Jia Pingwa - Ruined City

The three of them scrounged up a writing brush and ink to decorate the mourning hall. It looked terrible for a famed calligrapher to have nothing but his picture in the hall after his death, so Zhuang took up the brush and wrote In Mourning for Mr. Gong Jingyuan , to be pasted above his photo. For the two sides of the picture, he wrote In Life and Death a Son, Xiaoyi and Here and There, the Companionship of Four Friends . Then he wrote two long couplets for the gate: A big eater and drinker, he could make and spend money for the good life and A great calligrapher and painter, he could come and go at ease for a carefree departure .

“This couplet is perfect,” Ruan said. “It could not have been a more accurate depiction of his life. No one who sees this would dare say anything bad about him. But I think the couplet in the mourning hall was too highbrow for me to understand.”

“What’s so hard to understand?” Wang asked. “One is about how he gave Xiaoyi life and died at his son’s hand, then vented his anger at the useless boy. The other one is about the four of us, who are well known to everyone in Xijing. Now that he’s gone, he’s there and we’re here, and we feel that our time is also running out, so we express our grief. Is that what you meant, Zhidie?”

“You can read it however you want,” Zhuang said as he got someone to place a wreath at the entrance before affixing a length of wire to hang black crepe and fabric. Finally the yard felt funereal. Ruan sent someone to find a tape of mourning music, which he played on a cassette deck. “He was, after all, a good friend of ours,” he said, “and we often got together at hotels because of his connections. Whenever we went out for a drink, he’d be the one who paid. Now that he’s gone, we’ll have fewer chances to enjoy good food, if nothing else. He lived an active life, but ended up like this because of his worthless son. These days, people are opportunists; when he was alive, they nearly wore out his threshold coming for his calligraphy, but now that he’s dead, not even their dogs will come when called. He’s lucky he had us. Let’s write more on the mourning scroll to express our sadness over his death and extol his fame one last time. That way it won’t look too dreary when his wife returns from Tianjin.”

Agreeing that it was essential, Zhuang spread out the paper to let Wang write something.

“I’m not very literary to begin with, and now that I’m here, my brain has dried up,” Wang said. “When I came in the past, we wrote and painted together, but that will never happen again. So let me paint something.” After licking the inky tip of his brush, he stood still for a moment before putting it to work, and with a carefree flick of his wrist, a vivid sketch of an orchid appeared before their eyes.

“Fantastic!” Ruan Zhifei said. “A lush orchid is the perfect portrayal of his personality. He was brilliantly talented and lived an unrestrained life. I know that some people were critical of him, but no one can deny that he wrote every single door sign on Xijing Street. And there’s no official, no matter the rank, who doesn’t have one of his scrolls hanging in his house. But I’ve never seen any painter add roots to an orchid. Why draw a jumble of messy roots, without putting it in soil or a pot?”

“I shudder when I think about how an outstanding figure like our friend Gong died with nothing, and that’s why I didn’t paint the soil or a pot,” Wang said as he wrote I cry for my brother Gong / Sadly, he has departed this world . He finished up with Respectfully, Wang Ximian . Finally he imprinted his seal. It was now Ruan’s turn.

“I’m a terrible calligrapher,” he said, “but I won’t ask Zhidie to write for me. It’s just that I can’t think of a single line and must ask for your help, Zhidie.”

“Just write whatever is on your mind.”

“I have a couplet, but the two parts don’t match. Well, it’s all I can do.” He wrote: You’re gone, Brother Gong; the value of your calligraphy will triple in value. Here I am, Ruan Zhifei / When we play mahjong, we will now be only three, missing one . He was overcome by grief when he put down the brush. “I’m leaving now.” He walked out and sobbed all the way home.

Zhuang took up the brush, but his hand shook so much he had to stop several times. So he took out a cigarette, lit it, and picked up the brush again as sweat beaded his forehead.

“Aren’t you feeling well, Zhidie?” Wang asked.

“I’m in emotional turmoil. I keep feeling that he’s not dead and is in fact standing next to me watching me write.”

“He did like to watch you write, complimenting your elegant prose while criticizing the composition of a particular character. We will never have a friend like him again.”

The comment made Zhuang’s heart ache; he closed his eyes as tears rolled down his cheeks. Dipping the brush in the ink, he wrote on the spot moistened by his tears: I was born late, you died early / Visitors have never stayed long in Xijing / The wind wails for you and for the loss of a barrier between the living and the dead , and You are in the underworld, I am in the human world / Everywhere yellow dirt buries people / The rain laughs at you and me, blurring the line between there and here .

His face was wet by the time he finished. After kneeling before the bier, he offered up a cup of water to the departed as he crumpled to the floor and passed out. Niu Yueqing yelled out and helped him up, pinching his philtrum and prying open his mouth to give him some water. Finally he came to; everyone sighed deeply over the extent of his grief.

“He’s gone, don’t be too sad,” Wang said. “If he’s watching us, he’d be happy to know how much you miss him.” Wang told Zhuang to go home and rest and that he’d stay behind to make sure everything was done properly. Niu Yueqing and Zhao kept quiet, as they knew what was on Zhuang’s mind, and it wasn’t something they could bring up; instead they hailed a taxi and went home with him.

. . .

At home, Zhuang did nothing but sleep for three days straight and ate very little. Niu Yueqing knew she could only advise him not to go back to the Gong house, so he stayed away, not even going to see Gong’s wife when she returned. Niu Yueqing, on the other hand, bought items for the mourning rites and went over every day to help Gong’s wife. That went on for several days, until she had dark circles under her eyes.

Zhuang slowly recovered, and after ten days it dawned on him that he hadn’t had any fresh milk for quite some time. He asked Liu Yue, who told him she hadn’t seen Aunty Liu, either. One day when he was bored, he went on an outing with Tang Wan’er. When they reached a village, Zhuang said, “Ai-ya! Isn’t this Maowa Village? Aunty Liu lives on the south side. It’s been a long time since I had fresh milk. Maybe she’s ill. Why don’t we visit her? I’d become a cow if we are what we eat.”

“You and a bull do have one thing in common,” she said.

“Do you mean the hair on my arms?” He rolled up his sleeves. “Or my stubborn nature?”

“Neither. Your horn.” Zhuang was puzzled, so she explained with a folk tale:

“Once upon a time, there were a mother and daughter who opened an inn and got rich within a few years. It turned out that the inn had an unwritten rule: The mother and daughter would sleep with traveling merchants. If a man could not take them both, he would leave everything behind the following morning. If a man proved to be too much for mother and daughter, he could stay for free, even for ten days or two weeks if he wanted to. Every single merchant left empty-handed and shame-faced. One particular merchant rose to the challenge and came to stay at the inn with a load of merchandise. Confident that he was strong enough to make all the men proud, he nevertheless was apprehensive, so he carried an ox horn with him just in case. Early the next morning he was losing steam, so he used the horn to defeat the mother and daughter. Feeling sheepish about his ruse, he sneaked off before dawn. Later, when the two women made up the bed, a horn rolled out from under the pillow, but they didn’t know what it was, so the mother said, ‘Hmm! No wonder we lost. Just look at this. I wonder how that thing of his could shed something this big!’”