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

Horsie had never fooled around with girls. He was twenty-six when he met Lü Yuan, who by that time was already a familiar face to the rest of us. We were having a meal together and had invited Lü Yuan, and she had brought along two other young women. There were five of us guys, and we were mentally taking their measure, and they, the three girls, were mentally choosing between us. So there we were, eating and gabbing and kidding around, each of us trying our best to put on a good show, the guys waxing eloquent, the girls posturing and preening.

Horsie alone said nothing at all, because he was engaged in the serious business of dining, his head parallel to the table, a faint smile on his face as he listened to us chatting and joking. That evening he didn’t say more than a few sentences, and he didn’t actually dine very extensively, eating only half a dozen shrimp and washing them down with a glass of beer.

We soon forgot about him. At the beginning we would cast him a glance from time to time. He’d be slowly savoring a mouthful of beer, or he would pick up a shrimp with his chopsticks and pop it into his mouth, and a moment later pucker up his cheeks and purse his lips, at which point we stopped looking at him. Then, after we had pretty much forgotten he was there, Lü Yuan suddenly gave a cry of astonishment. Her eyes bulging, she pointed a finger at Horsie’s table setting. It was then we noticed a row of shrimp, five in all, big and small alike, lined up in front of him. Transparent shrimp shells lay sparkling in the light, deposited back on the plate by Horsie after he had cleanly extracted the meat inside. Seeing this, the other two girls gasped with surprise.

Horsie then picked up the last shrimp on the platter. His arm stretched across the table at the same height as his lowered head, and when his chopsticks gripped the shrimp, his elbow twitched with the speed of a lobster’s pincers and he deposited the shrimp in his mouth.

Now he raised his head, and calmly looked at us flabbergasted spectators. His lips closed, his cheeks bulged, his mouth wriggled like an intestine, and his Adam’s apple made a fluid up-and-down movement. Eventually, his bulging cheeks contracted and his Adam’s apple rose. It lingered a moment in that elevated position as he swallowed, a cautious, dignified expression on his face.

His Adam’s apple slipped down and his mouth opened. Then came the moment that left us stupefied: he disgorged what appeared to be a complete and undamaged shrimp, but — and this was the crucial point — it had nothing inside it. He put this intact but meatless shrimp on the table, next to the neat row formed by the other five — equally hollow — crustaceans. Again, a string of exclamations came from the three girls.

Just six months later, Lü Yuan became Horsie’s wife. The other girls at the dinner got married too, to guys we didn’t know.

· · ·

BY MARRYING HORSIE, Lü Yuan detached him from us. From then on, when we sat down to a meal together, we were no longer joined by the avid diner. To be honest, we couldn’t quite get used to it. We had begun to appreciate how striking were those two parallel lines across from us, Horsie’s head and the tabletop — the unchanging distance between Horsie’s head and the table surface so like that between a boarding jetty and the shore. Sometimes, when Horsie sat by the window and sunlight shone in from outside, we noticed that Horsie’s head had a twin on the table’s surface: a black shadow, slightly flattened at its extremities, which slowly shrunk to the thinnest of strips as the light shifted. We had never seen such a long and thin head, not even in a cartoon. Another time we were sitting in a dimly lit room and once, when I stood up, I bumped into the low-hanging ceiling lamp. The top of my head stung with a scorching pain, and the lamp itself swayed so violently that the shadow of Horsie’s head swung to and fro on the table in crazy motion for a good two minutes, performing in that time practically all the headshaking Horsie would ever need to do.

After Horsie got married, Guo Bin was the only one of us who stayed in touch with him on a regular basis. Often, in the early evening, wearing a gray windbreaker, his hands in his pockets, he would walk from one end to the other of the longest street in town and arrive outside Horsie’s apartment. Then he would curl his long fingers and knock on the door.

Guo Bin told his friends that the atmosphere in Horsie’s new home was entirely Lü Yuan’s creation. From the bedroom to the living room, the walls were crowded with close-ups of Lü Yuan. The earliest photo had been taken when she was just one month old and the others dated from each of the succeeding years, for a current total of twenty-three. In only three of the prints could one see Horsie’s smile, and next to it was the more enchanting face of Lü Yuan. “Unless you look carefully,” Guo Bin said, “you won’t notice Horsie at all.”

Guo Bin went on to tell us that the furniture in Horsie’s house followed a white theme, decorated with pink highlights. The carpet was beige, the walls were beige, and even Horsie’s clothes — the clothes purchased after he was married — had beige as the keynote. Guo Bin attributed all of this to Lü Yuan’s preferences and recommendations. “Did you ever see Horsie wear beige before?” Guo Bin asked.

“Absolutely not.” He answered his own question right away. “Now that Horsie dresses in beige,” he went on, “he looks heavier than before, paler too.”

Guo Bin said that Horsie’s apartment was like a single girl’s dorm room, with all kinds of knickknacks displayed: “From the bookshelves to the cabinets, there’s little animals everywhere: flannel, glass, bamboo — you name it. There’s even a big black flannel bear on top of the bed. But as for Horsie’s things, you won’t see so much as a pen of his on the table. It’s only when his clothes are drying on the balcony that you have a chance of finding some trace of his property in the apartment.” Guo Bin gave a smirk at the thought of the stuffed bear. “Could it be that even as a married woman,” he asked us — and himself too—“Lü Yuan still hugs her bear when she goes to sleep?”

As time went on, Guo Bin’s familiarity with Horsie’s apartment grew steadily more complete, and he would brag that even if he were to walk around the apartment for half an hour with his eyes closed he could still manage to avoid knocking into a single chair. What’s more, he said he knew how items were distributed and what things could be found in what cabinet, and if anyone was curious he could provide a detailed inventory.

“There’s a drawer in their bedside table,” he said, “which holds all their identity papers and their bankbooks. It’s locked. Under the drawer is a pile of Lü Yuan’s panties and bras. There are stockings and scarves there too.”

As for Horsie’s underwear, socks, and scarves, there was no special place reserved for them, for they were crammed into a wardrobe with the rest of his stuff — winter clothes, summer clothes, spring and autumn clothes — all in a single drawer, no less. One time, Guo Bin saw for himself the immense effort involved if Horsie wanted to put his hands on a simple undershirt. It was as though he were searching through a garbage heap for discarded clothes, first sticking his head into the wardrobe, then his shoulders too, eventually emerging with just a pair of underpants in his hand. He tossed them aside, then took his entire collection of clothes in his arms and dumped everything on the floor. He knelt in front of this little mountain of clothing and spent another half hour rummaging around before at last he managed to find his undershirt.

Guo Bin gave us to understand that only he could grasp the subtle relations between Horsie and Lü Yuan. “You people just can’t imagine what goes on between them.” He gave an example to back up his claim.