Говард Голдблатт - Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused - Fiction From Today`s China [редактор Говард Голдблатт]

Late that night, Shu Nong climbed onto the roof for the very first time. He prowled the dusty roof catlike in his bare feet, not making a sound. The world, having lost its voice, allowed Shu Nong to hear the wild beating of his heart. He walked to the edge and squatted down, holding a clothespole to keep from falling. He could see into Qiu Yumei's second-story room through the transom.

Simply stated, Old Shu and Qiu Yumei were in bed, making love.

In the weak light of the bedside lamp, Qiu Yumei's naked, voluptuous body gave off a blue glare; that was what puzzled Shu Nong. Why is she blue? Shu Nong watched his father ram his squat, powerful body against Qiu Yumei over and over, shattering then congealing the blue glare with lightning speed, until his eyes seemed bombarded with an eternal light. They're killing each other! What are they doing? Shu Nong saw his father's face twist into a grimace and watched Qiu Yumei squirm like a crazed snake. They really are killing each other! Darkness quickly swallowed up their faces and abdomens. The heavy, murky smell of river water seeped out from the room, and when it reached Shu Nong's nostrils, he was reminded of the filthy river flotsam. With the river flowing beneath their window, the one nearly merging with the other, the smells from the window polluted the river, and both created a barrier against Shu Nong's thought processes. He felt as if the world around him had changed, that he really and truly had become feline after falling under the spell of darkness and rank, puckery odors. He mewed and sought out something to eat.

That was the night Shu Nong began spying on his father and Qiu Yumei while they were carrying on.

Shu Nong the voyeur screeched like a tomcat.

Thinking of himself as a tomcat, Shu Nong screeched as he watched.

After each time, a little white object came flying out the second-story window and landed in the river. Shu Nong knew the things belonged to his father but couldn't tell what they were. So once he climbed down and headed for the river, where he saw the thing floating on the surface like a deflated balloon. He plucked it out of the river and onto the bank with a dead branch. It shone glittery white in the moonlight and lay in his hand like a little critter: soft and slippery. Shu Nong slipped it into his pocket and went home to bed. But soon after he lay down, a brilliant idea popped into his head. He took the sheath out, wiped it clean, and, holding his breath, stretched it over his little pecker; he was struck by a sensation of vitality that seized his consciousness. Shu Nong slept like a baby that night, and when he awoke the next morning, he was overjoyed to discover that for some reason, he hadn't wet the bed. Why was that?

The story goes that the sheaths Shu Nong fished out of the river solved his problem, but you needn't buy into that argument if it seems too far-fetched.

Shu Nong's night prowls atop number 18 went undetected for the longest time. Then one day, Old Shu found two yuan missing from his dresser drawer, so he searched his sons' pockets. In Shu Gong's pockets, he found one yuan and some change and a pack of cigarettes; in Shu Nong's pockets, he found three condoms. Needless to say, the unexpected discovery of condoms shocked and enraged Old Shu.

The first order of business for Old Shu, whose methods of punishment were unique on Fragrant Cedar Street, was to tie Shu Gong to his bed. Then he removed a cigarette from his son's pack, lit it, and puffed it vigorously. He asked the hogtied Shu Gong, "Want a puff?" Shu Gong shook his head. "Here, try it. Don't you want to be a smoker?" Before waiting for an answer, he shoved the lit end of the cigarette into Shu Gong's mouth, and Shu Gong screamed bloody murder. Old Shu clamped his hand over his son's mouth. "Stop that crazy screaming. It won't hurt long. The cigarette will burn out in no time. You can have another one tomorrow if you want."

Shu Nong's punishment was a touchier matter since Old Shu wasn't sure how to handle the situation. When he called his younger son into the little storeroom, he could barely keep from laughing as he held the three condoms in his hand and asked, "Do you know what these are?"

"No."

"Where did you get them?"

"The river. I fished them out."

"What did you have in mind? You're not making balloons out of them, are you?"

Shu Nong didn't answer. Then Old Shu saw flashes of deep green light in his son's eyes as he answered in a raspy voice: "They're yours."

"What did you say?" Suddenly, Old Shu knew he had a problem. He wrapped his hands around Shu Nong's neck and shook his puny skull for all he was worth. "How do you know they're mine?"

Shu Nong's face was turning purple, but rather than answer, he just stared into the strangler's face, then let his gaze slide down past the brawny chest and come to rest on his father's fly.

"What are you looking at?" Old Shu slapped Shu Nong, who flinched although his gaze stuck stubbornly to his father's fly. He was given another glimpse of the blue glare, which made him lightheaded. Old Shu grabbed his son's hair and banged his head against the wall. "Who were you spying on? Who in the hell have you been spying on?" Shu Nong's head banged into the wall once, twice, but he felt no pain. He was watching blue specks dance before his eyes like a swarm of wasps. He heard the screech of a cat on the roof; he and the sound merged into a single entity.

"Cat," Shu Nong said weakly as he licked his torn gums.

Old Shu wasn't sure what his son was talking about. "Are you saying the cat was spying?"

"Right, the cat was spying."

Some Fragrant Cedar Street neighbors passing beneath the window at number 18 stopped to gawk as Old Shu beat his son mercilessly. People living on Fragrant Cedar Street considered boys well raised if they were beaten often, so there was nothing unusual here. But the victim's behavior perplexed them. Instead of screaming and carrying on, Shu Nong appeared determined to bear up under the punishment, which was a big change from before.

"What did Shu Nong do?" one of the window gawkers asked.

"Wet the bed!" Old Shu replied from inside.

No one had any reason to suspect any different, since Shu Nong's bed-wetting was well-known up and down Fragrant Cedar Street. The neighbors were sensitive, alert people but not particularly adept at digging beneath the surface to get to the heart of a matter. When Shu Nong's destructive tendencies first began to manifest themselves, the people were too tied up in their belief that he was still fourteen and still wet the bed to spot the differences.

Shu Nong had stopped wetting the bed at the age of fourteen, but no one would believe it. Or better put, people found Shu Nong's bed-wetting interesting, but not the cessation of his bed-wetting. Take Shu Nong's mortal enemy, Hanzhen, for instance: she chanted the following when she jumped rope:

One four seven, two five eight,

Shu Nong bed-wets at a nightly rate.

Hanli, who rarely spoke to her mother, told a schoolmate, "My mother's a slut, and I despise her."

Folks assumed that Hanli was aware of her bloodline. Since half the women on Fragrant Cedar Street feuded with Qiu Yumei, any one of them would have happily let her in on the secret. But more to the point was Hanli's precociousness. She didn't need to be told what was what. You can't wrap a fire in paper, after all.

Hanli had not spoken to Old Shu for years. He bought her a scarf for her seventeenth birthday, but deaf to his entreaties, she cut him dead at the foot of the stairs. So he gave the scarf to Qiu Yumei, who tried to drape it around Hanli's shoulders. Hanli tore it out of her hands and flung it to the ground, then spit on it. "Who needs it? Who knows what you're up to?"

"Old Shu gave it to you only because he likes you. Don't be an ingrate."