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

“This time it has nothing to do with going to the bathroom,” I said.

My father smiled. “Tell me, what is it you have to do? Who are you going to see?”

At that moment I really didn’t know how to respond. Fortunately, my mother did something silly. She forgot what she had just been saying. “Who else could it be?” she blurted out. “Apart from those guys Shen Tianxiang, Wang Fei, Chen Liqing, and Lin Meng, who else could he be going to see?”

I took advantage of the possibility presented. “Lin Meng,” I said, “is precisely the person I need to go and see.”

“What do you need to see him about?” My father was not about to do anything silly. He was going to carry on grilling me.

I began to spin him a line. “Lin Meng got married. His wife’s name is Pingping …”

“They’ve been married three years already,” my father said.

“That’s right,” I said. “The thing is, they’ve been happy together all this time, but now there’s trouble …”

“What kind of trouble?”

“What kind of trouble?” I thought for a minute. “You know, the kind of trouble that happens in a marriage …”

“What kind of trouble in a marriage?” My father still wouldn’t let me off the hook.

It was my mother who spoke up then. “They’ve got to be quarreling over something.”

“That’s right, they’re quarreling,” I said.

“If the two of them are quarreling, what’s it got to do with you?” My father grabbed me by the sleeve and tried to pull me into the study.

I resisted. “They’ve started to fight,” I said.

My father loosened his grip, and he and my mother looked at me. At this point I was suddenly inspired and began to explain things with effortless fluency:

“It was Lin Meng who first slapped Pingping in the face. Then she fell on him and took a big bite out of his arm. She bit a big hole in his shirt and must have done a lot of damage underneath, because her canine teeth are sharper than bayonets. She must have spent a full three minutes biting him, and Lin Meng was in such pain he was screaming like a stuck pig the whole time. When those three minutes were up, Lin Meng gave Pingping a taste of his fist and his foot. He punched her in the face and kicked her on the leg, and Pingping was in such pain she collapsed on the sofa and couldn’t say a word for ten minutes. After that, she really lost her marbles, picking up everything she could lay her hands on and throwing it at Lin Meng. She was so crazy, now it was his turn to be frightened. When she smashed a chair against his midriff, it didn’t actually hurt that much, but Lin Meng pretended to keel over in agony, collapsing on the sofa and clutching his belly. He thought Pingping would change her tune when she saw him in this state, that she would stop hitting him, that she would run over and hug him and burst into tears. But what happened was that Pingping, seeing his eyes were closed, picked up an ashtray and smashed it on his head. Now Lin Meng really did faint …”

Finally, I said to my stupefied parents, “As a friend of Lin Meng, I should go and see him, don’t you think?”

THEN I WAS WALKING along the street, on my way to see these two old friends of mine. I had gotten to know one of them when I was five, the other when I was seven. They were both four years older than me. When they married three years ago, I gave them a blanket as a present, and they sleep under this blanket in the spring — and in the autumn too — so sometimes before they fall asleep they will suddenly think of me and say, “It’s almost a month since we last saw so-and-so …”

I hadn’t seen them for a month, and now as I walked toward them I began to miss them. First of all, I thought of their little home with its cute decorations, the dozen or so balloons that they tied to the windows, from the ceiling, and beside the chest of drawers. I didn’t have a clue why these two loonies were so fond of balloons — and pink ones too. I remembered once, when I was sitting on their sofa, I happened to notice there were three pink panties hanging on the line on the balcony, practically the same color as the balloons, and I figured these had to be Pingping’s panties. My first impression had been that they were three balloons, and I was almost about to say that there were balloons hanging on the balcony too. Fortunately I didn’t say that, for I’d realized on closer inspection that they weren’t balloons at all.

I liked them both. Lin Meng is the kind of person who talks and laughs very loudly. Nine months of the year he wears a brown jacket, and the other three months, because it is so hot, he wears something else. Then his bones stick out and his arms dangle loosely as he walks along the street, so it always seems as though there’s empty space inside his clothes.

He is the kind of person who doesn’t know his own weaknesses. He has a tendency to stutter, for example, but he himself doesn’t realize this, or at least he has never acknowledged it. His wife, Pingping, is a good-looking woman. She has long hair, but most of the time she wears it up. Aware that her neck is slender and pretty, she sometimes wears clothes with high collars, and once her neck is concealed it is even more beautiful, for the high collar looks like a flower petal.

Four years ago, there was nothing going on between them, they were just acquaintances. None of us had any idea how they got together. It was me who made the discovery.

That particular evening I was really bored. First I went to see Shen Tianxiang, but his mother said he had gone out at lunchtime and was still not back. Then I went to see Wang Fei, and found him lying in bed all flushed, burned to a frizzle by the soaring temperatures. Finally I went to Chen Liqing’s home, and he was pounding the table and having a big row with his father. My foot never crossed his threshold, because I didn’t want to get involved in other people’s quarrels, especially not one between a father and son.

I went back out onto the street again, and just as I was wondering where to go next, I caught sight of Lin Meng. He was walking along under the trees with a quilt under his arm. Although the leaves obscured the light from the streetlamps, I recognized him immediately and called his name. I was so pleased by our fortuitous meeting that my voice seemed unusually loud. “Lin Meng,” I said, “I was just about to go and see you.”

Lin Meng’s head swiveled in my direction, then turned away. I quickened my pace to catch up with him. “Lin Meng, it’s me,” I called once more.

This time his head kept looking straight ahead, and I had to run forward and clap him on the shoulder. He glanced at me and gave a bad-tempered grunt. It was only then I realized Pingping was walking by his side, a bottle of water in her hands. She gave me a little smile.

Later, they got married. Their married life was happy, so far as I could tell. In the early days we would often run into each other on the steps of the cinema, or sometimes at the entrance to a shop, when I was passing by and they were coming out.

In the first two years of their marriage, I visited their home a few times, and each time I would run into Shen Tianxiang or Wang Fei or Chen Liqing, or all three of them at the same time. We felt very much at home at Lin Meng’s place. We could sit on the sofa, or sit on their bed with their quilt folded up behind us for comfort. Wang Fei would often go and open the door of their refrigerator to see what was inside — not, he said, because he was hungry, but simply to have a look.

Lin Meng is a cheerful kind of guy. He uses as his teacup a large glass jar, the kind designed to hold instant coffee, and he likes to plunk a chair down next to the door and sit there with his back against the door, holding that big jar in his hands and laughing his head off as he talks. In no time at all he starts to bullshit. Often he would divulge indiscreet details about his and Pingping’s private life, and he got a kick out of this. He’d laugh so much he’d knock his head against the door with a resounding thump.