“Fenghuang… Fenghuang…” Ximen Huan was beginning to slur his words.
Siren whining, the ambulance drove up and the EMTs jumped out with their medical equipment and a gurney. But Ximen Huan lay in Kaifang’s arms, eyes closed.
Twenty minutes later Lan Kaifang had his hands, covered in the blood of Ximen Huan, clamped around the killer’s throat.
Dear reader, the death of Ximen Huan hurts me deeply, but in purely objective terms, it swept away the barriers keeping Lan Kaifang from pursuing Pang Fenghuang. That said, the curtain was raised on another, even greater, tragedy.
All kinds of mysterious phenomena exist in this world, but answers to most of them have come with advances in scientific knowledge. Love is the sole holdout – nothing can explain it. A Chinese writer by the name of Ah Cheng wrote that love is just a chemical reaction, an unconventional point of view that seemed quite fresh at the time. But if love can be initiated and controlled by means of chemistry, then novelists would be out of a job. So while he may have had his finger on the truth, I’ll remain a member of the loyal opposition.
But enough about that. We need to look at Lan Kaifang. He took charge of Ximen Huan’s funeral arrangements and, after gaining approval from his father and his aunt, buried Huanhuan’s ashes behind Ximen Jinlong’s grave. Now, instead of dwelling on the older folks’ mood, we return to Lan Kaifang, who showed up every night in the train station hotel basement room rented by Pang Fenghuang. And whenever he wasn’t tied up during the day he went to the square and fell in behind Fenghuang and her monkey, wordlessly following them like a bodyguard. When grumbling among his men at the station reached the ear of the old commander, he sent for Kaifang.
“Kaifang, my young friend, there’s no lack of nice girls in town, but a girl with a trained monkey… the way she is… how do you think it looks.”
“You can remove me from my post, Commander, and if you think I’m not even qualified to be an ordinary policeman, then I’ll quit.”
This stopped the talk immediately, and as time passed, the grumbling members at the station changed the way they viewed him. Sure, Pang Fenghuang smoked and drank, dyed her hair blond, had a nose ring, and spent her time roaming the square, the antithesis of a good girl. But how bad could she be? Eventually, the cops started making friends with her, and liked to tease when they ran into her on their beats:
“Say, Golden Hair, take it easy on our deputy commander. He’s wasting away to nothing.”
“That’s right, you’re going to have to ease up sooner or later.”
Fenghuang never paid any attention to their well-intentioned taunts. The monkey snarled at them.
At first, Kaifang tried to get her to move to 1 Tianhua Lane or into the family compound, but after receiving one refusal after another, even he began to realize that if she stopped spending her nights in the train station hotel basement and roaming the square, he’d probably lose interest in working at that substation. It did not take long for the town’s hooligans and troublemakers to realize that the pretty “golden-haired, nose-pierced, monkey-trainer girl” was the favorite of the blue-faced, hard-nosed deputy commander of the train station, and they abandoned any thoughts of moving in on her. Who’d be foolish enough to try to take a drumstick out of a tiger’s mouth?
Let’s try to imagine the scene of Kaifang’s nightly visits to Fenghuang in her basement room. Originally a guesthouse, the place had been bought and turned into a hotel, and if regulations had been strictly enforced, it would have been a prime candidate for being shut down. That was why the fat face of the proprietress crinkled into an oily smile, honey dripping from her reddened lips, when Kaifang showed up
Fenghuang refused to open the door the first few nights, no matter how hard he pounded. So he’d stand there like a post and listen to her weep – sometimes laugh hysterically – inside. He also heard the monkey screech and, sometimes, scratch at the door. Sometimes he smelled cigarette smoke, sometimes liquor. But he never smelled anything illegal, at which he was secretly overjoyed. If she’d taken up drugs, she’d have been a lost cause. Would he still have loved her if that were the case? The answer was yes. Nothing could have changed that, not even if her insides had rotted away.
He never failed to bring a bouquet of flowers or a basket of fruit, and when she refused to open the door, he stood there until he had to go, leaving the flowers or fruit outside her door. With a decided absence of tact, the proprietress once said to him:
“Young man, I can get you a handful of girls. All you have to do is choose the one you want…”
The icy glower in his eyes and the cracking of knuckles as he clenched his fist nearly made her wet herself. She never said anything like that again.
Then one day Fenghuang opened the door. The room was dark and dank. The paint on the walls was peeling and blistery; a naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling provided little light in a room heavy with the smell of mold. It was furnished with a pair of twin beds and a couple of chairs that looked as if they’d been scavenged from the local dump. Being in one was like sitting on cement. That was when he first tried to get her to move. One of the beds was for her, the other was for the monkey, who slept among some of Ximen Huan’s old clothes. There were, in addition, two vacuum bottles for hot water and a fourteen-inch black-and-white TV set, also picked up at the local dump. In those shabby, uninviting surroundings, Kaifang finally said what he’d kept bottled up for more than ten years:
“I love you,” he said. “I’ve loved you from the first time I saw you.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying,” she sneered. “The first time you saw me was on your granny’s
“I fell in love with you before I knew how to crawl!”
“No more of that, please.” She lit a cigarette. “For you to fall for a woman like me is like tossing a pearl down a latrine, don’t you think?”
“Don’t run yourself down,” he said. “I understand you.”
“You understand shit!” she sneered again. “I’ve been a whore, I’ve slept with thousands of men! I’ve even slept with the monkey! You, in love with me? Get out of my sight, Kaifang. Go find yourself a good woman and stay clear of the foul airs I give off.”
“Liar!” Kaifang said, covering his face with his hands and starting to sob. “You’re lying. Tell me you haven’t done any of those things.”
“What if I have? And what if I haven’t? What business is it of yours?” She sneered. “Am I your wife? Your lover? My folks have washed their hands of me, so what makes you different?”
“I love you, that’s what!” he was screaming.
“Don’t use that disgusting word with me! Get out of here, poor little Kaifang.” She waved the monkey over and said, “Dear little monkey, let’s you and me go to bed.”
The monkey sprang onto her bed.
Kaifang drew his pistol and pointed it at the monkey.
Fenghuang wrapped her arms around her monkey and said angrily:
“Shoot me first, Lan Kaifang!”
Kaifang’s passions were running high by then. He’d heard rumors that she’d been a prostitute, and he wasn’t sure if he believed them or not. But when she maliciously told him to his face that she’d slept not only with thousands of men but with her monkey, it was as if a volley of arrows had pierced his heart.
Shocked and hurt, he stumbled out of the room and ran up the stairs, out of the hotel, and onto the square, his churning mind and heart erasing all threads of thought. As he passed a bar lit up by neon signs, two heavily made- up women dragged him inside. Seated on a high bar stool, he slugged down three shots of brandy and then laid his head down on the bar as a woman with blond hair, dark circles under her eyes, bright red lips, and lots of skin, front and back, drifted up to him – he never went to see Fenghuang in uniform – to reach out and touch his blue birthmark. As a recently arrived butterfly from the countryside, she didn’t realize that he was a policeman. Almost as a conditioned reflex, he grabbed her by the wrist, drawing a shriek from her. He smiled apologetically and let go. She rubbed up against him and said flirtatiously, “Elder Brother has quite a grip!”
Kaifang waved her away, but she pressed her hot bosom up to him and sent blasts of air reeking of cigarette smoke and liquor into his face.
“Why are you so sad, Elder Brother? Did some little vixen break your heart? Women are all the same. But your little sister here can make you feel better…”
As pangs of loathing swept through his heart, Kaifang was thinking: I’ll get even with you, you whore!
He tumbled off the bar stool, and “little sister” led him by the hand down a dark corridor and into a will-o’-the- wisp room, where, without a word, she stripped and lay out on the bed. She still had a nice figure, with full breasts,
