Yu Hua - Boy in the Twilight - Stories of the Hidden China

“What do you mean, ‘no matter what it takes’?” I asked.

“Starting today,” he said, “I’m sleeping at the manager’s place.”

Lü Qianjin was as good as his word. At nightfall he went off cheerfully to the manager’s house, holding a quilt in his arms. Lü Qianjin spent only three nights there before he came into possession of the key to a new apartment. He waved the key in my face. “See this? This is a key! This is the key to my new apartment.”

I took Lü Qianjin’s key in my hand and inspected it. It was a new key, sure enough. “When you went to the manager’s house with a quilt in your arms, what did the manager say?” I asked.

“What did the manager say?” Lü Qianjin thought for a moment and shook his head. “I forget what he said exactly. All I remember is what I said to him. I said that my apartment was too small, that there was no room for me to sleep, so I was moving to his house for the night …”

I interrupted him. “Your apartment is bigger than everybody else’s. How could you say you have no room to sleep?”

“That’s called tactics,” said Lü Qianjin. “I put it that way so the manager would be clear that if he didn’t give me a new apartment I would stay on at his place. Actually, he knows perfectly well I have a large apartment, but he gave me this key all the same.”

After that, Lü Qianjin said to me, “Yang Gao, I’ll tell you what to do. Starting today, take all the trash you collect when sweeping the workshop floor and dump it outside the factory manager’s apartment. Within three days, the manager will put a new key in your hands.”

Saying this, he dangled his key in front of my eyes. “A key just as new as this one.”

I shook my head. “Although my apartment’s small, there’s plenty of space for my mother and me. I don’t need a new apartment.”

When he heard me say that, Lü Qianjin clapped me on the shoulder and chuckled. “You’re still a sissy, just like your dad.”

6

They all said my father was a coward. They said he never got mad at anybody and never raised his voice, even when others stuck their fingers in his face. They could grab him by the lapels of his jacket and hurl abuse at him, but he would never say a word of protest. They said he would bow and scrape to everyone he met, that his face would be wreathed in smiles even if he ran into a beggar who wanted to cadge a meal off him. Anyone else, they said, would send the beggar packing with a kick up his ass, but my father would wine him and dine him, a smile glued on his face the whole time. They told all these stories about my father being a timid creature, rounding them off with commentary on how he didn’t smoke and didn’t drink.

What they didn’t know was that my father looked really fine sitting in his truck. When my father walked toward his Liberation truck, his footsteps resounded with a louder ring than usual and his arms would swing in a wider arc. He would open the door, sit himself down in the cab, and slowly don a pair of white cotton gloves. He would lay his gloved hands on the steering wheel and his foot would press down on the accelerator, and off he would go in his Liberation truck.

They said my father never dared to curse anyone, not even his own wife and child, and they were quite right there — my father never cursed my mother and he never cursed me. But when my father was speeding down the highway in his truck, he did stick his head out the window and shout at pedestrians, “Are you trying to get killed?”

That’s when I was sitting in the cab next to him. I was watching the leaves and branches of trees as they flitted past the truck window, watching the road ahead as it glinted in the sunlight. I had a commanding view of the pedestrians who appeared on either side of the highway, and when one of them made a move as if about to cross the road, my father would shout, “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

My father would turn his head and glance at me. His eyes gleamed with the confidence of a man who was in complete control. “Yang Gao,” he would say, “keep a good look out and next time I’ll let you be the one to shout.”

So then I kept my eyes peeled, watching people walk by the roadside. I saw somebody up ahead begin to cross, only to change his mind and return to the shoulder. I gripped the window frame with both hands and my mouth opened, but no words came out. I was too afraid.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” my father said. “There’s no way he can catch up with us.”

I watched as our truck roared past. The man quickly became just a tiny figure receding in the distance, and I knew that my father was right — people on the road could not possibly catch up with us, and I could shout at them without the slightest scruple. I put my hands on the window jamb once again, and carefully surveyed the people walking by the side of the road. When another person tried to cross, I felt my body quivering all over and I gave a feeble shout: “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

“Not loud enough,” my father said. “You need to shout louder than that.”

In the rearview mirror I could see how the truck quickly left the man behind, and I shouted with all my might, “Are you trying to get yourself killed?”

Then I set back against the seat. I felt utterly drained. My father was laughing as he held the steering wheel, and after a moment or two I began to laugh myself.

7

I like being with Lü Qianjin, because he’s such a daredevil. He’s more fearless even than Zhao Qing, Song Hai, Fang Dawei, Hu Qiang, Liu Jisheng, or Xu Hao. Though he’s the smallest and skinniest of the lot, he’s much the most daring. I often wonder if Lü Qianjin has eyes like a goose, so everybody looks puny in his eyes, so he’s afraid of nobody. He has three stab wounds on his face, all from cuts he inflicted on himself with a kitchen cleaver. He ran home after losing a fight, picked up the kitchen cleaver, and then chased after his adversary. When he caught up with him, he cut himself on the face, then raised the cleaver and advanced on his enemy, who took to his heels in fear.

Later, Song Hai and the others said, “Nobody would ever dream of cutting their own face with a cleaver, but Lü Qianjin will. That’s why everyone is afraid of him.”

“Why did you have to cut your face?” I asked him.

“That was to show the other guy I would stop at nothing,” said Lü Qianjin. “You know what they say: ‘The timid fear the bold, and the bold fear the reckless.’ ”

That’s when I realized Lü Qianjin was even more daring than the bold — he was reckless. “And what are reckless people afraid of?” I asked him.

“They’re not afraid of anything.”

There he was wrong. Reckless people actually have moments when they’re scared too, and Lü Qianjin is a case in point. There was one night — and very late it was — one night when Lü Qianjin and I had both been working on the final shift of the day. I left the plant ahead of him, and walked as far as a street that had no lights. It began to rain, so I took shelter under the eaves of a house and stood there in the dark for some time. Then I heard footsteps approaching, but I couldn’t see who it was — all I could make out vaguely was a low silhouette. As the figure came closer I could see he had a coat draped over his shoulders and was walking toward me with his head down. As he passed he gave a cough, and right away I knew who it was. It was Lü Qianjin. Because he had a cold he had been coughing the whole day through. When he coughed it sounded even more disgusting than the sound of someone throwing up — it was as though his throat was clogged with sand. He gave a drawn-out, hacking cough as he walked past.