Wang Anyi - The Song of Everlasting Sorrow

That was Long Legs, patiently cultivating his interpersonal relationships. People like him, who know how to get by in society, may look on the surface as if they are always on the move, but in fact they are, relatively speaking, quite stable, and they have accepted principles to which they adhere. Like people who commute to work every day, their comings and goings are governed by fixed routine. Their day usually begins around eleven o’clock, when most factory workers start their second shift, and finishes up around midnight. When they say goodnight, each goes his separate way and gradually disappears into the shadows under the trees.

Riding his beat-up old bicycle, Long Legs would head toward the southwest corner of the city. There were few people out on the streets as he slowly pedaled past. At first he would hum some tunes as he rode, but that gradually ceased. The only sound left was the rattle of his bicycle chain. As the streets grew more desolate and the streetlights became more spread out, his light heart began to sink. If one of his friends could have laid eyes on him at that moment, they wouldn’t have believed that he was the same person. Joyless and melancholic, he knit his brows in a fury of impatient frustration that made him look ferocious. His face darkened and lost its usual glow. By then he had arrived at a residential area built in the 1970s, which, due to the shoddy construction and low-quality building materials, already looked old. Under the moon, which came out abruptly from behind the clouds, it looked like a series of massive cement boxes — there wasn’t a single light on in the whole complex. This was a place where nightmares lurked; only one sentient soul walked here — that was Long Legs. If you could have seen him from above as he rode through those cement boxes, you would have thought he looked like an insect crawling among the tombs in a graveyard.

Long Legs stopped in front of one of the buildings and leaned his bicycle against the wall. As he stepped inside, the darkness consumed him. Poor Long Legs: it was going to take a mighty effort to walk up a staircase cluttered with all kinds of random items that left the passerby barely a footwide space to squeeze through. But then at that moment he changed into a nimble cat, silently making his way upstairs, two or three steps at a time. From this you can imagine how long he must have been living here. He opened the door onto a dimly lit interior; the only light inside was coming in from the hallway window. There was also the sound of water coming from the broken toilet. The hallway was filled with various odds and ends. Two families had shared this unit for years; the cobwebs in the corner were proof. The first thing Long Legs did was to go into the kitchen and open up the small screen door to the cabinet, where fresh leftovers were kept, to look inside. He did this from force of habit — he wasn’t really hungry. Inside the cabinet were a few bowls, their contents coated with a thin layer of mold. Closing the door, he grabbed a jug of water from under the stove before going into the bathroom. A few minutes later came the sound of water gently splashing as Long Legs washed his feet in the basin. He did all of this by the faint light of the moon coming through the window; he didn’t need to turn on the light — he could have done it with his eyes closed. He sat on the toilet with his feet soaking in the basin, the dry towel in his hand draped over his knees, and stared straight ahead. A few insects scurried over the damp concrete floor. What was Long Legs thinking?

If you hadn’t seen it with your own eyes, you would have never believed where Long Legs slept. His bed was set up outside one of the bedrooms. At the head of the bed was a square dinner table smelling of grease. Above it was a makeshift shelf used to store winter blankets in the summer and bamboo mats in the winter, as well as an assortment of items kept there all year round even though they all should have been thrown away. Thus it looked as if Long Legs was crawling into a hole to sleep. As soon as he had squeezed himself in, he would cover his face with the blanket and, within moments, would be whisked away by his nightmares deep down into the darkness of night. He wouldn’t move after that, consumed by a dark silence that lay beyond words. The darkness of the nights there was the real thing; bottled up inside those cement blocks, it became even more concentrated. Coming in from the bright world, how could Long Legs possibly bear all of this? That’s why he covered up his head and went into a deep sleep that was akin to weeping, like a weeping ostrich. If you witnessed the sorry sight of his bent waist and scrunched up legs as he tried to tuck his body into a bed where it would never fit, you would cry too.

In the light of day, the same spectacle would take on an air of the ridiculous. That’s because a late-riser like Long Legs usually didn’t get out of bed until quite late. Even if he got up early, where could he possibly go? That was when all of Shanghai’s night owls were still in bed! And so he too stayed in bed. Everyone in the apartment who had to get up early for school or work walked around his bed, talking loudly as if he wasn’t there. They sat down on the edge of his bed to eat breakfast, their chopsticks clanking against their bowls all the while. Through the open windows and doors the morning sun shone directly down on Long Leg’s sleeping form — this was the nightmare he had to endure when the sun came up. Who ever said that nightmares only come at night? Some don’t. As if they were deliberately trying to distance themselves from the intense quiet the night before, they made as much noise as possible, with noises of all kinds — now that was a bona fide ruckus! But Long Legs slept right on through it, the sole creature asleep in a world of boisterous beasts. The ruckus usually lasted for at least an hour; then came the sound of doors closing, followed by the echo of footsteps going down the stairs, and the sound of bicycle bells gradually dying off in the distance. But just before the descent of that final silence there came an assault of music — morning calisthenics at the neighboring elementary school; the overpowering rhythm of the music made its way into Long Legs’ ears, transporting him back to his childhood.

As a boy, Long Legs was accustomed to another kind of music. Every day, around four o’clock in the afternoon, a bell would ring along the intersection at the railroad tracks near his home. As soon as the bell started to ring, his two older sisters would take him over by the tracks to wait for the train, and he would stand between them, holding each one by the hand. He had some faint memories of the old house they lived in back then, one among a row of bungalows. He and his two sisters would rush down the small footpath past these makeshift homes, as if they were late for some important meeting. As they approached the intersection, the hazard light would be blinking, warning pedestrians and vehicles to stop; the bell would still be sounding. Then came the toot of the whistle and the train would come rumbling toward them. At first it seemed to take its time, but as it got closer it suddenly flew past like a bolt of lightning. The carriages flashed by in a blur; there were people inside, but he could never make out their faces. Long Legs used to wonder: Where are they going? Once the last carriage had passed, there would be a brief pause before the mechanical arms blocking the road would slowly rise, letting a flood of people and vehicles onto the tracks. Long Legs would recognize a familiar face in the crowd — his mother. He was the only boy in the family; one sister was seven years older than he, the other one six, and both were his babysitters. At one time they tied a rope to the tree outside their house, affixing a stool to the end of the rope to make a swing. That was their playground. There were also the ants crawling on the bricks outside and the worms slithering through the mud — these were their playmates.