probably spread until the whole rotten limb was stiff as a frozen gourd. I wondered what this little girl would think of me after the leg was amputated and I had to walk with crutches, lurching back and forth like the pendulum of a clock. Would she be as grateful to me as ever? No way. Not on your life. Any time I made a major sacrifice for anyone, all I ever got in return was deep-seated loathing and vicious curses, unparalleled in their savagery. My heart was deeply scarred, pierced all the way through. And whenever I offered it to someone, fully marinated in soy sauce, all they ever did was piss on it. I loathed humanity, in all its hideousness, from the depths of my soul, and that included this gluttonous baby girl. Why had I rescued her in the first place? I could hear her reproachful voice: Why did you rescue me? Did you expect gratitude? If not for you, I'd have long since departed this filthy world, you perverse blundering fool! What you deserve is another dog bite.
As my thoughts ran wild, my attention was caught by a mature smile creasing the baby's face, sweet as beet sugar. She had a tiny dimple, the skin between her eyebrows had begun to flake, and her elongated head had gotten rounder. No matter how you looked at it, she was a lovely, healthy baby. In the face of this warm, sincere life, splendid as a sunflower – there I was, thinking about sunflowers again – I refuted all my absurd thoughts. Maybe I was wrong to loathe people, and now it was time to love them. The philosophy teacher reminded me that pure hate and pure love are both ephemeral and should coexist. So be it: I would loathe and love people at the same time.
The twenty-one yuan I'd found in the swaddling clothes had barely paid for one sack of milk powder, and I'd made no progress in my search for a new home. My wife's constant mutterings rang in my ears. And my parents, well, they were like marionettes, often going the whole day without saying a word, a perfect complement to my gabby wife. Our daughter was fascinated by the new baby, often sitting beside me as I squatted by the winnowing basket and stared at the little girl lying inside it. Anyone seeing us might have thought we were captivated by some strange tropical fish.
If I couldn't find somewhere to dispose of the baby very soon, and if she ate up the twenty-one yuan her parents had left with her, I knew what was in store for me. So off I went, dragging my injured leg behind me as I visited every one of the dozen or more villages in the township, begging for help from every childless family. The answer was virtually the same every time: We want a son, not a daughter. Up till then, I had always considered my township to be a special place with upstanding people, but a few days of traveling from one end to the other quickly changed that opinion. The place was teeming with ugly little boys, all of whom stared at me with eyes like dead fish, deep wrinkles creasing their foreheads, the expressions on their faces those of long-suffering, hateful impoverished peasants. They shuffled along when they walked, their backs were already stooped, and they coughed like old men. The sight intensified my sense that mankind was in worse shape than ever. To me, they were living proof that the villages in my township were filled with “little treasures” who should never have been born in the first place. Despairing for the future of my hometown, I forced myself not to think of the posterity these males who were old before their time might produce.
One day, while I was out on the road trying to unload the baby, I ran into an old friend from elementary school. He couldn't have been more than twenty-two or twenty-three, but he looked fifty. When the conversation turned to families, he said sadly, “I'm still a bachelor, and I guess that's how I'll stay.”
“I thought you were well off financially.”
“I'm doing all right, but there just aren't enough women to go around. If I had sisters, I could work a swap for a wife. Unfortunately, I don't.”
“I thought township regulations outlawed that kind of marriage arrangement.”
He gave me a puzzled look. “Just what do those township regulations mean?”
I nodded. When I told him about the baby I'd found and all the trouble that had caused me, he listened in stony silence, without a trace of sympathy in his eyes. He just puffed on the cigarette I'd given him. The tip of the cigarette sizzled, but not a wisp of smoke emerged from his mouth or nose. As far as I could tell, it all disappeared deep down in his stomach.
Five days later he came to see me. With obvious embarrassment, he said, “Why not… why not give me the baby? I'll raise her till she's eighteen…”
I looked agonizingly into his face, which showed even greater agony, waiting for him to continue.
“When she's eighteen… I'll only be fifty… and who says I can't…”
“Old friend,” I interrupted, “don't say any more, please.”
I bought two more sacks of powdered milk with my own money, to which my wife responded by smashing one of our chipped bowls. Through tears of genuine sorrow, she said, “I've had it! I can't take it anymore! You obviously don't care what happens to us anyway… I've scrimped on food till I don't need to go to the toilet anymore, just to save money. And for what? So you can buy milk for somebody else's kid?”
“You're my wife,” I said, “so please don't take your unhappiness out on me. You see me go out every day to find a home for her, don't you?”
“You should never have brought her home in the first place.”
“Yes, I know that. But I did, and we can't let her starve.”
“What does that make you, a man with a good heart?”
“Good people don't get what they deserve, do they? After all these years we've been together, I wish you wouldn't nag me. If you've got a solution, tell me, what is it? We can work together to place this child somewhere, what do you say?”
“Yes,” she said, flashing her most fetching pout. “Once we get rid of this child, we can have another one of our own.”
“Have another one?”
“Yes, a son!”
“Another one!”
“Twins would be best.”
“Yes. Yes.”
“Go to the hospital and talk to our aunt. Maybe she can come up with something. Widows and widowers from the city are always asking her to help them find children.”
The final battle. If my aunt, who worked in the hospital's obstetrics ward, couldn't help me find a home, the chances were 80 or 90 percent that I was fated to be the baby's adoptive father. If that's how this all wound up, it would be an unending calamity both for her and for me. I lay in bed that night, oblivious to the onslaught of bedbugs, listening to my wife grind her teeth, smack her lips, and breathe heavily as she dreamt; my heart felt as if it had turned to ice. Finally, I crawled quietly out of bed and went outside, where I looked up at the desolate stars in the sky and felt I had, at last, found a bit of understanding. The damp night air wet my back, and my nose ached from sadness. All of a sudden I knew the importance of treasuring my own life; for too long I'd lived for other people, and vowed to reserve some of the love in my soul for myself. Back inside, I heard the gentle, even breathing of the baby in her winnowing basket. Picking up a flashlight, I shone it down on her. She'd wet herself again, and the liquid had seeped through the slats of the basket onto the floor. I changed her diaper. With Heaven's help, this would be the last time I had to do that!
My aunt, who had just finished delivering a baby, was sprawled in a chair in her white uniform, which was covered with sweat and drops of blood, trying to catch her breath. She'd gotten a lot older in the year since I'd last seen her. She bent forward in greeting when she saw me walk in. Her nurse was in the delivery room cleaning up; a newborn infant in its cradle was bawling.
I sat down in the same nurse's chair I'd sat in the year before, directly across from my aunt. A plastic-covered obstetrics textbook for nurses lay on the table.
“What are you doing back here?” she asked lazily. “After you were here last year, you went back and wrote a book that made me look like some kind of demon!”
“It wasn't well written,” I said with an embarrassed smile.
“Want to hear a story about a fox fairy?” she asked. “If I'd known that even a fox fairy tale could wind up in a book, I'd have given you a whole trainful of them.”
Without any encouragement from me, and no regard for how exhausted she was after having delivered a baby, she told me a story. During the previous winter, she began, an old man out gathering manure early one morning encountered a fox with a broken leg. He picked it up and carried it home on his back as a pet. The fox's injured leg was nearly healed when the old man's son came to visit. This son, an impetuous young fellow, was a battalion commander. The moment he laid eyes on the fox, he took out his revolver and, without a word, shot it dead. As if
