Sima Liang had disappeared five years earlier. We buried Sima Ku the day after he was shot, and Sima Liang took off that night. A cold, dank wind from the northeast made the chipped pots and jugs on the wall sing out gloomily. We sat dully in front of a solitary lantern, and when the wind blew out the flame, we sat in the darkness. No one spoke; we were all caught up in the scene surrounding Sima Ku’s burial. Lacking a coffin, we had to wrap his body in a straw mat, like a leek in a flat-cake, good and tight, and truss it up with rope. A dozen or so people carried his body over to the public cemetery, where we dug a hole. Then we stood at the head of the grave, where Sima Liang fell to his knees and kowtowed once. There were no tears on his finely wrinkled face. I wanted to say something to make this dear friend of mine feel better, but couldn’t think of a thing. On the road home, he whispered, “I’m going to take off, Little Uncle.” “Where to?” I asked him. “I don’t know.” At the moment the wind blew out the lantern flame, I thought I saw a dark, hazy image slip out the door, and I was pretty sure that Sima Liang had left, though there wasn’t a sound. Just like that, he was gone. With a bamboo pole, Mother probed the bottom of every dry well and deep pond in the area, but I knew she was wasting her time, since Sima Liang was not the type to kill himself. Mother then sent people into neighboring villages to look for him, but all she got were conflicting reports. One person said he’d spotted him in a traveling circus, while someone else said he’d seen the body of a little boy by the side of a lake, his face pecked clean by vultures; a group of conscripts back from the Northeast said they’d seen him near a bridge over the Yalu River. The Korean War was heating up then, and U.S. warplanes came on daily bombing runs.
I looked into the little mirror Zaohua had given me, getting my first good view of my features. At eighteen, I had a shock of yellow hair, pale, fleshy ears, brows the color of ripe wheat, and sallow lashes that cast a shadow over deep blue eyes. A high nose, pink lips, skin covered with fine hairs. To tell the truth, I’d already gotten an idea of what I looked like by looking at Eighth Sister. With a sense of sadness, I was forced to admit that Shangguan Shouxi was definitely not our father, and that whoever he was, he looked like the man people sometimes talked about in hushed conversations. We were, I realized, the illegitimate offspring of the Swedish man of the cloth, Pastor Malory, a couple of bastards. Frightful inferiority feelings gnawed at my heart. I dyed my hair black and darkened my face, but there was nothing I could do about the color of my eyes, which I’d have liked to gouge out altogether. I recalled stories I’d heard about people who committed suicide by swallowing gold, so I rummaged around in Laidi’s jewelry box until I found a gold ring dating back to Sha Yueliang’s days. I stretched out my neck and swallowed the thing, then lay down on the
“That’s right, Pastor Malory was your father, so what? Wash that stuff off your face and out of your hair, then go out in the street with your head held high, and announce: My father was the Swedish Pastor Malory, which makes me an heir to royalty, and a damned sight better than the likes of you turtles!” All the while she was slapping me, Eighth Sister sat quietly spinning her threads, as if none of this had anything to do with her.
I sobbed the whole time I was squatting in front of the basin washing my face, turning the water black. Mother stood behind me, cursing under her breath, but I knew I was no longer the target of those curses. When I was finished, she ladled out some clean water and poured it over my head as she began to cry. The water ran down my nose and chin and into the basin on the floor, slowly turning the water clear again. While she dried my hair, Mother said: “Back then there was nothing I could do, son. You are what you are, so stand up straight and act like a man. You’re eighteen years old, no longer a child. Sima Ku had his faults, plenty of them, but he lived his life like a man, and that’s worth emulating.”
I nodded obediently, but suddenly remembered the gold ring. Just as I was about to tell her what I’d done, Laidi ran breathlessly into the house. She’d begun working at the district match factory, and was wearing a white apron stenciled with the words: Dalan Starlight Match Factory.
“He’s back, Mother!” she announced nervously. “Who?” Mother asked.
“The mute,” First Sister said.
Mother dried her hands and looked into First Sister’s haggard face. “I’m afraid it’s your fate, Daughter.”
The mute, Speechless Sun, “walked” into our front yard. He had aged since the last time we’d seen him; flecks of gray poked out from under his army cap. His rheumy eyes were more clouded than ever, and his jaw looked like a rusty plow. He was dressed in a new yellow uniform with a high-collar tunic, buttoned at the throat, a row of glittering medals on his chest. His long, powerful arms ended in a pair of gleaming white gloves, his hands resting on squat, leather-trimmed stools. He was sitting on a red Naugahyde pad that was attached to him. His wide trouser legs were tied together at his waist, below which were two stumps. That was the image the mute, whom we had not seen for years, presented to us now. Stretching the squat stools out in front with his powerful arms, he heaved his body forward and moved closer, the pad strapped to his hips glistening red in the light.
With five lurching movements, he brought himself up to within about ten feet of us, far enough that he didn’t have to strain to look up at us. Dirty water splashed as I rinsed my hair and flowed to the ground in front of him. Putting his hands behind him, he lurched backward, and at that moment it dawned on me that a person’s height depends mainly on his legs. The upper half of Speechless Sun’s body looked thicker, bulkier, and more menacing than ever. Even though he’d been reduced to a torso, he retained an awesome fearfulness. He looked us in the eye, a welter of mixed emotions showing on his dark face. His jaw quivered, much as it had years ago, as he grunted over and over the same word: “Strip, strip, strip…” Two lines of diamondlike tears slipped down his cheeks from gold-tinged eyes.
Raising his hands in the air, he made a series of gestures to the accompaniment of “Strip strip strip,” and I realized we hadn’t seen him since he’d traveled to the Northeast to inquire into the whereabouts of his sons, Big and Little Mute. Covering her face with a towel, Mother ran tearfully into the house. Understanding her meaning at once, the mute let his head sag down on his chest.
She returned with two bloodstained caps, which she handed to me and signaled me to give him. Forgetting all about the gold ring I’d swallowed, I walked up to him. Gazing up at my rail-thin body as I stood before him, he just shook his head sadly. I bent over, but quickly changed my mind and squatted down in front of him, handed him the caps, and pointed to the northeast. Images of that sad journey rushed into my head, with the mute carrying the wounded soldier on his back away from the front lines and, far worse, the horrifying sight of the two little mutes lying dead and abandoned in the artillery shell crater. He took one of the caps from me, raised it to his face, and smelled deeply, the way a hunting dog might sniff out the odors of a killer on the run or a corpse. He placed the cap between his stumps and grabbed the other one out of my hand, smelling it the same way before tucking it away with its mate. Then, without bothering to see if it was all right, he lurched into the house and examined every corner of every room, from the living spaces to the milling room and the storeroom. He then went back outside to look over the outhouse in the southeast corner of the compound. He even stuck his head inside the chicken coop. I followed him everywhere he went, captivated by how nimbly and uniquely he moved from place to place. In the room where First Sister and Sha Zaohua slept, he sat on the floor beside the
Now seated on First Sister’s bed, he looked like the head of the family, or a true leader, and as I stood at the head of the bed, I felt like an uninvited visitor in someone else’s room.
First Sister was in Mother’s room, and I could hear her crying. “Get him out of there, Mother,” she said through her tears. UI didn’t want him when he had legs. Now that he’s only half a man, I want him even less.”
“It’s easy to invite a deity into one’s life, child, but hard to get one to leave.”
“Who invited him in?”
“I was wrong to do that,” Mother said. “I gave you to him sixteen years ago, and now our nemesis is here to stay.”
Mother handed a bowl of hot water to the mute, who showed a bit of emotion as he took it and gulped it down.
