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

They looked at the cleaver in my upraised hand; their mouths opened and laughter came out. I thought to myself, What’s the matter with them? Why are they laughing so hard? So I asked them, I said, “What’s so funny? What are you so happy about? Lü Qianjin, why are you laughing too? I’ve got an idea why Song Hai and the rest of them are laughing, but I can’t understand why you think it’s so funny.”

They just laughed all the harder. Lü Qianjin fell on the table, he was laughing so much. Song Hai and Fang Dawei stood next to him, one hand on their bellies and one hand on his shoulder. My ears were buzzing with the sound of their laughter. I stood there with the cleaver in my hand and didn’t know what to do. I watched as they laughed, watched as they gradually stopped laughing and wiped away their tears. Then Song Hai pressed Lü Qianjin’s head down on the table. “You need to offer Yang Gao your neck.”

Lü Qianjin raised his head and shoved Song Hai’s hand aside. “No way! No way am I going to offer him my neck.”

Song Hai persisted. “Come on, give him your neck. If you don’t do that, he won’t know what to do.”

Fang Dawei and company added their comments. “Lü Qianjin, if you don’t give him your neck, it won’t be any fun.”

“Fuck this,” said Lü Qianjin. Then with a laugh he laid his head on the table. Liu Jisheng and the rest pushed me over next to Lü Qianjin, and Song Hai took my hand and guided the cleaver to Lü Qianjin’s neck. When the cleaver made contact with his skin, his neck contracted, and he sniggered. “The cleaver’s making my neck all itchy,” he said.

I noticed some pimples on Lü Qianjin’s sunburned neck. “You’ve got a lot of spots,” I said. “Your system is out of whack. You must not have been eating enough vegetables lately.”

“I haven’t eaten any vegetables at all,” he said.

“If you don’t fancy vegetables, then watermelon will do just as well,” I said.

“Yang Gao, cut the crap,” Song Hai and the others said. “Weren’t you planning to carve up Lü Qianjin? Now you have his neck right underneath your cleaver and we want to watch how you do it.”

It was true. Lü Qianjin’s neck was at the mercy of my cleaver. All I needed to do was to raise my arm, chop, and his neck would be severed. But when I saw Song Hai and the others again killing themselves laughing, I couldn’t help thinking that the prospect of seeing me cut his head off was what made them so happy, and I began to feel distressed on Lü Qianjin’s account. “They’re supposed to be your friends,” I said. “But if they were really your friends, they wouldn’t be so happy. They should be trying to talk me out of it. They should be pulling me away. But look at them — they’re looking forward to me cutting your head off.”

Hearing this, they laughed all the louder. “See, there they go again,” I said to Lü Qianjin.

He was laughing too, still with his head against the table. “You’re right,” he said. “They’re not true friends of mine. But then neither are you. If you were really my friend, you wouldn’t be about to cut my head off with a cleaver.”

This made me uneasy. “The only reason I’m doing this,” I said, “is because you beat me up. I wouldn’t be doing it otherwise.”

“I just hit you a couple of times, that’s all,” Lü Qianjin said, “but here you are cutting me up with a cleaver. You’re forgetting how good I was to you in the past.”

This made me think. I recalled things that had happened earlier, times when Lü Qianjin had helped me out, when he’d got into a fight or a row with someone on my account, and lots of other things, but now I was trying to cut him up. Although he had given me a beating, he was still my friend. I put the cleaver to one side. “Lü Qianjin,” I said, “I am not going to cut you up after all.”

Lü Qianjin lifted his head off the table and gave his neck a rub. He looked at Song Hai and the others and laughed, and they looked at him and laughed.

“Although I’m not going to cut you up,” I went on, “I can’t just leave it like this. You slapped me and kicked me all over the place. I’m going to give you a slap now, and we’ll call it quits.”

I reached out and gave him a box on the ear. When people heard the whack of my hand hitting Lü Qianjin’s face, their laughter evaporated. I saw Lü Qianjin’s eyes widen. He pointed at me and cursed. “What the hell do you think you’re doing!”

He knocked over the chair and delivered four slaps to my face, hitting me so hard that my head lolled and my eyes went blurry, and then he punched me fiercely in the chest, so hard my lungs wheezed. I fell to the ground, and he kicked me in the belly, so hard my stomach churned. His foot delivered a series of kicks to my legs, hard enough to break my bones. As I lay on the floor, I heard a buzz of conversation, though I couldn’t make out what they were saying. All I felt was waves of pain from head to toe, as though my body was being wrung out like a wet towel.

At five o’clock on a Saturday afternoon, several hundred workers crowded around the main entrance to the machine factory, waiting for the bell that would mark the end of their shift. The metal gate, still tightly shut, clanged as the people in front banged against it, while a buzz of conversation rose up from the people behind, punctuated by shouts here and there. As they awaited release, the workers were like livestock trapped behind bars, idly clustered in the dimming light of dusk, crowded together in the howling wind. The large windows in the factory behind them were already shrouded in darkness, and the desolate scene was enlivened only by the clouds of dust that swirled around the workshops.

Shi Zhikang, a man of fifty-one, stood in the front row in his military overcoat, directly facing the crack between the two leaves of the steel gate. The icy wind blew in through the narrow gap and onto his face, making him feel as though his nose was shrinking.

Next to him stood the old gatekeeper, his bald head flushed by the cold. Over a thick padded jacket he wore a faded boiler suit; the end of a large key projected from his chest pocket. People were yelling at him to open the gate, but he might as well have been deaf. He looked from side to side, and every time someone directed an impatient comment his way he would turn his head and look in the other direction. Only when the bell rang did the old man finally take the key from his pocket, while the people in the front row took a step back to give him room. As he moved forward, he made a point of thrusting his elbows behind him and put the key in the hole only when his arms met no resistance.

Shi Zhikang was the first to make it out the gate. He set off rapidly along the road to his right, planning to walk to the stop before the factory and catch the trolleybus there, to avoid the scrum outside the gate. At least forty workers would try to push and shove their way onto the trolleybus, although it would already be full of passengers by the time it reached the factory.

As he walked, Shi Zhikang thought about those forty workmates, imagining how they would cluster around the bus stop just as they had crammed in front of the gate. There would be a dozen hefty young men and at least a dozen women, three of whom had started work the same year as him. All three had medical conditions now: one had a ropy heart and the other two had kidney problems.

As he was thinking about that, the bus stop came into view, and at the same time he saw a trolleybus coming his way, so he took his hands out of his pockets and ran, arriving at the stop just as the bus pulled in. People were already waiting there in three clusters and, as the bus slowed down, the clusters moved to position themselves in line with the bus’s three doors. When the bus stopped, the clusters became stationary. The doors opened and passengers squeezed out in a tight, solid stream like toothpaste from a tube, and then, in a dense mass of limbs, people piled on.