things off the path ahead. Scattering madly, the little frogs eventually opened up a narrow lane for them. “Hurry up,” he said with a tug, “let's go.”
Ultimately, they wound up in front of an area covered with rubble. By then the rain had all but stopped and the sky was clearing. After folding their umbrellas, they climbed to the top of a huge boulder that had, sometime in the past, been carefully chiseled by stonemasons. He wrung out his rain-soaked shirt, then shook it out and put it back on. He sneezed, putting as much effort into it as possible to win her sympathy; it didn't work. Shaking his head in mockery of himself, he stood atop the rock and, like all mountain climbers who have reached a summit, thrust out his chest and gulped in the clean air. His mood turned bright and sunny, like the sky, now that the rain had stopped. The air is so clean and fresh here, he was about to remark to her. But he didn't. It was as if they were the only people anywhere in that vast garden, and to him that seemed almost miraculous. Now that he was in a good mood, he took another look at the rubble-strewn ground around him. The huge chiseled rocks were so famous, so evocative, had been framed in so many lenses and shown up in so many poems, yet now they were as common as rocks anywhere. They stood silently, yet somehow seemed to be unburdening themselves of thousands upon thousands of words. They were, in the end, silent stone giants. There in front of the ruins, a pond over which a fountain had sprayed water two centuries earlier was virtually covered by waterweeds, sweet flag, and reeds. Wild grasses he couldn't name flourished in the cracks between rocks.
After helping one another down from the boulder, they went over and climbed another one that was even higher and bigger. Cool winds swept past, slowly drying the clothing that clung to their bodies. The hem of her black skirt began to flutter in the breeze. When he rubbed his hand over the rock, which had been washed clean by the rain, a clean, fresh aroma rose up to greet him. As if a deep, dark secret had been revealed to him, he said:
“Smell this. It's the smell of a rock.”
She was gazing fixedly at a stone column that had once supported some large edifice; she looked as if she hadn't heard him. Her gaze seemed capable of boring into the column to discover what was deep inside. At that moment he noticed the strands of gray hair by her temples. A long sigh rose up from the depths of his heart. He reached over and picked up a strand of hair that had fallen to her shoulder and said with heartfelt emotion:
“The time just flies by, and here we are, getting old.”
She responded by revealing what was on her mind:
“The words carved on these rocks will never change, will they?”
“Rocks change,” he said. “The cliche that seas dry up and rocks rot away, but the heart never changes is nothing but a beautiful fantasy.”
“But in Shen Garden nothing ever changes.” She was still staring at the rocks, as if conversing with them, while he was reduced to being an inconsequential audience of one. But he was determined to respond to her comment. In a loud voice, he said:
“Not a single thing in this world is eternal. Take this famous garden, for instance. Two hundred years ago, when the Qing emperor built it, no one could have imagined that in the short space of two centuries it would be reduced to ruins. Back then, the marble stones in the vast halls on which the emperor and his ladies took their pleasure might now be the rocks on which commoners have built a pigsty.”
Even he sensed how dry and inane his comment was, little more than nonsense. He knew she hadn't heard a word, so he didn't go on. Taking a damp pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, he picked out one that was relatively dry and lit it with his lighter.
A pair of magpies flew past above them and landed on the top of a distant tree, where they chirped noisily. He felt like saying, See how free birds are! But he'd gotten into the habit of swallowing his comments before they broke loose. Just then, a joyous squeal erupted from her mouth and sparks lit up the darkness in her eyes. He cast a surprised look at her, then looked where she was pointing. There in the gray-blue sky was a gorgeous rainbow. She was hopping around like a little girl and shouting at the top of her lungs:
“Look, look!”
Her joy was infectious. The multicolored bridge arching across the sky drove all thoughts of the dark realities of life out of his head, and he was instantly immersed in childlike delights. Without being aware of it, they had drawn close together, as they gazed intimately into each other's eyes. No evasions or sidesteps, no hesitation or wavering; first their hands joined naturally, and then they fell just as naturally into each other's arms. They kissed.
The gorgeous rainbow had disappeared by the time he was sampling the light taste of mud on her lips. The vast ruins spread out around them, a dark purple light glinting off the rocks strewn about and lending a majestic air to the scene. Insects hiding in the waterweeds chirped and clicked, and the crisp honks of geese drifted over from somewhere far off. He glanced casually at her wristwatch. It was seven o'clock.
“Damn!” he blurted out anxiously. “Doesn't your train leave at eight?”
Abandoned Child
IHAD BARELY PICKED HER UP OUT OF THE SUNFLOWER FIELD WHEN I felt that my heart was clogged with gummy black blood and was sinking heavily in my chest, like a cold stone. A grayness filled my head, like a street swept by a cold wind. It was, in the end, her vibrant, croaking wails that roused me out of my bewildered state. I didn't know whether to thank or hate her, and was even less sure whether I was doing a good or a bad thing. I gazed into her long, wrinkled, melon-yellow face with a sense of alarm, seeing two light-green tears in her eyes and the toothless cavern of her mouth – the cries emerging from it were wet and raw, forcing all the blood in my body into my limbs and my head. I could barely hold the red satin-wrapped infant.
I staggered mournfully out of the sunflower field with her in my arms, rustling the leaves shaped like round fans; the white downy hairs on their coarse stems rubbed against my arms and cheeks. I was sweating by the time I emerged from the field; spots on my body that had been scratched by the leaves and stems stood out like red welts from a whip and burned like the stings of insects. But my heart hurt even worse. In the bright sunlight, the satin wrapping of the infant burned my eyes with its fiery redness; it also burned my heart, which felt as if it were enclosed in a layer of ice.
It was high noon; the field spread out around me, the roadway was a murky gray, and the roadside weeds looked like entwined snakes or worms. A cool wind blew from the west, while the sun's rays blazed, and I couldn't decide whether to complain about the cold or about the heat. It was, in other words, a typical autumn midday. Which meant that the farmers were staying put in their villages.
A little bit of everything grew on one side of the road or the other: soybeans, corn, sorghum, sunflowers, sweet potatoes, cotton, and sesame. The sunflowers were in full bloom, a vast cloud of yellow floating amid the verdant crops. A scant few reddish brown hornets flitted through the subtle fragrance. Crickets set up a mournful cry from beneath the leaves, while locusts flew into the air, only to be snapped up by swallows, some of which perched on low-slung telephone wires stretching over the field. The way their necks were hunched down, I could tell they were eyeballing the smooth gray river that flowed placidly through the field below. I detected a heavy, sticky, life-giving odor like that of raw honey. The vitality of life rose all around me magnificently, and this splendid liveliness manifested itself in a steamy mist rising from the rampant weeds and robust crops. A solitary white cloud hung motionless in the astonishingly blue sky, like a virginal young maiden.
She was crying still, as if she'd been cruelly mistreated. At the time, I didn't know she'd been abandoned. I doubt that my pity, which was worth so little, could prove to be of much benefit to her, but it brought me nothing but agony. I can't help but believe that the saying “good deeds are seldom repaid in kind” is a law of the universe. You may think yourself virtuous for rescuing someone from the jaws of hell, but others will assume that your actions are self-serving, even destructive! From now on, you won't catch me performing any good deeds. That doesn't mean, of course, that I'll turn to evil. I suffered greatly because of that infant girl, and could feel it coming even as I carried her out of the sunflower field.
I was the only passenger in the rickety bus that had delivered me to the Three Willows stop no more than half an hour before I spotted the baby girl in the sunflower field. During the bus ride I found myself becoming increasingly conscious of the superiority of our social system. The ticket-taker, a girl with a face like a sparrow's egg, was saying the very same thing. The way she yawned all during the trip was a good sign that she hadn't slept the night before – maybe she and her boyfriend had found a more enjoyable way to pass the night. And with each
