Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather (7 page)

A good fire is burning and the wood crackles quietly; close up, the sound of the wind drawn down into the chimney can be heard. The black marble fireplace is spotless and the shag carpet goes right up to it.

At this point a fourth person arrives. He is wearing a leather jacket. Without a word he too proceeds to pull the rope. The men are all conscientious, unflustered, and the rope is pulled taut. They move forward, one upturned hand after the other, and keep persevering, but it is very strenuous.

“A Chinese guy…” the old black man is singing in English, but doesn’t look at him. The old black woman runs her fingers rapidly over a set of keys, bending over the piano and swaying drunkenly, totally absorbed in the music, and also not looking at him. He keeps to himself and goes on drinking his beer. In the dark blue light no one looks at anyone else, entranced as they are by the music, like a crowd of nodding puppets.

The horse rears its hairy hooves. “Wandering all over the world…” sings the old black man.

The hands of the old black woman come down hard on the keys and there’s a boom as the ground shakes under the horse’s hooves. “Wandering all over the world, wandering all over the world…” As the old man sings, he plays the drums, and people nod to the beat.

The rope edges forward as the men pull on it, one hand after the other, straining their feet inside their shoes against the green grassy ground.

The spray splashes high as waves crash against the seawall. The waves under the seawall surge up and the beach can no longer be seen. The sunlight has the same intense brilliance, but the sky and the sea appear bluer.

One end of the rope finally appears. The fishhook, painted a bright red, has a huge dead fish hooked to it, and it is dragged onto the green grass. The fish on the hook has its mouth wide open and seems to be gasping futilely for air. The fish’s wide-open eyes have lost their shine and have a dazed look.

The seawater spills over the seawall and trickles down the other side. The sky turns dark blue and the sunlight seems to be even more strangely transparent.

A big cockroach with shiny wings and trembling feelers runs onto the milk white shag carpet and crawls over the twisted threads of wool. The hanging lamp casts a circle of light on the rear of a beautifully carved mahogany horse: its glossy round rump, its hind legs, and its hooves shod with little red brass nails.

“Wandering…all over the world! Wandering…all over…the world!” The piano keys sing in response to the wrinkled old black hands. The man moves his head to the music. On the counter in front of him are three empty beer glasses, and in his hand he has another half-empty glass. A white woman sits on the tall stool next to him. Her bottom, wrapped in a tight, short leather skirt, is round and shiny, like the horse’s rump.

Seawater like black satin is spilling over the seawall; at the foot of the wall in the spreading seawater lies a dead fish. There is an absence of sound. The tide and wind have suddenly stopped. Time seems to have frozen. Only the
sea, like a length of spreading black satin, is flowing and yet not spilling. Maybe it isn’t moving and only seems to be flowing, merely offering the sensation that it is flowing and only sensed as a visual image.

His hand squashes a fleeing cockroach on top of the electric stove. He turns on the tap but doesn’t flush it away. Instead he just looks at the splashing water.

“Want marijuana?” The voice is low, so low that it is mistaken for breathing because the music is very loud. As wrinkled black hands fly across the keys, they seem to be the words of the song softly repeated. But the old black man is not singing; head down, he sways as he continues to play the drums.

The shiny brass bomb hanging on a fleshy earlobe of the white woman swings gently.

Cockroaches are crawling on the patterned tiles over the sink, crawling on the lid of the enamel saucepan, crawling on the leather cover of the radio, crawling on the cupboard, crawling along the kitchen door. He puts on a rubber glove.

A big hand with blue veins is on the woman’s thigh, under the black leather skirt. Who does it belong to, and where is he? Is the old black man still playing the drums, is the piano still playing? Where is that pinging noise coming from? Anyway, everything seems to be swaying.

An eye, the dazed, cold gray eye of a fish, round and staring, dull and lusterless.

A pair of pointy pliers pulls out a tooth, the pale blood still clinging to the roots. He sniffs at it, it stinks a bit, and with a swing of his arm he tosses it away.

People are mountain climbing. Everyone is trying to outdo the other and it seems to be a race up the mountain. There are men and women, some wearing shorts, some carrying backpacks. There are also old and young people, some have walking sticks and some have small children, and pairs of boys and girls are holding hands, so it doesn’t seem to be a race. Everyone has been mobilized. Is it a holiday camp or are they the residents of the whole county town? It suits everyone, men and women, old and young; is it a trendy form of exercise?

Cockroaches are crawling everywhere. Wearing a glove covered with dead cockroaches, he is on his haunches, frantically swiping at them.

Two feet in pointed leather shoes are stepping about in midair. On the stage, a white-nosed clown is walking on his hands to the tune of a leaky accordion soundlessly oozing air.

Everyone is puffing and panting, sweating from their foreheads. All of them take out identical bottles labeled with the same brand of mineral water and, one by one, their broad, contorted faces produce similar smiles of well-being.

A hat spins silently on the end of a walking stick.

The wind is taking a break, and on the boundless sea the layers of white crests keep pushing closer and closer.
The sunlight is wonderful, the sky remains azure blue, and the seagulls are screeching.

People are marching in file along the mountain ridge. The person in the lead is holding a tattered old flag that billows in the strong wind. They are off in the distance, but the flapping of the tattered flag can still be heard.

The sea swells up to the stone steps beyond the doors, majestically, turbulently.

The ground is thick with cockroaches. He stands still, and bends his head to look around. He is utterly frustrated and can do nothing but take off the glove that is covered with dead cockroaches.

Without a sound, the sea spills over the doorsill into the room, and the cockroaches scramble to escape by crawling up the walls. Those not quick enough are caught in the swirling current and float up with it or lie on their backs pretending to be dead. He can’t help bending to look at them. He pokes at them with the glove, then throws it into the water, straightens up, and doesn’t bother with them anymore. The legs of the table and chair are underwater and some of the cockroaches in the water start crawling up them.

The people with the flag are marching in file along the gentle ridge. As they draw near, the man in the lead raises his walking stick high. The flag flapping noisily in the wind is in fact a string of bras—white silk, dark red brocade, flesh-colored netting—all tied together with black nylon
stockings. A small black leather bra shakes up and down from time to time and looks like a small bird trying to break free.

A large part of the concrete ceiling is wet, and the pooling water forms droplets that begin to fall.

In the underground cellar, someone is lying faceup on a mattress so old that it should be thrown away. His face is covered with a black hat, and his body is covered with a white sheet; the mattress is right in the middle of four wet concrete walls. Drops of water plop noisily onto the sheet and part of it gradually becomes wet.

His fat belly is exposed, covered only with bamboo medical suction cups; the part below his lower abdomen is covered with the white sheet.

Sitting on a small wooden stool, a cobbler wearing a felt hat takes the nail from between his teeth and presses it into the high heel of the shoe clamped between his knees. With one blow of the hammer, it is in.

The murky black seawater flows down from the stone steps, soundlessly, flowing down, one step at a time.

He looks up to the ruins of the fortress at the top of the cliff and goes up the broken stone steps that are in the shadows. The fortress, however, is in the sunlight and the outline and texture of each stone are quite distinct.

He enters the pitch black doorway of the fortress wall, then suddenly hears the sound of an iron chisel being hammered into rock. He stands still and the sound stops.
As soon as he resumes walking the sound follows his footsteps. He stops and the sound stops again. He then deliberately stamps his feet and the iron chisel clangs noisily. Finally, when he starts running hard, the sound vanishes.

It is a long, dark tunnel. He moves slowly ahead, groping. At the other end is a ray of light and the exit gradually appears—a doorway. Outside, the sunlight is brilliant, and the sound of the chisel can be heard clearly. Moving stealthily to the doorway, hiding in the shadows, he sees someone hammering at some rocks. He walks over and stops behind the man. The man turns around. He has a dry, sunken, old face creased with deep wrinkles, yellow and tanned, and his sparse front teeth are completely covered with tobacco stains. He is an old Chinese peasant from a mountain village and as he squints in the sunlight, his eyes are vacant in the slits, staring somewhere else. The vague sound of the sea vanishes just as it starts.

The murky black seawater surges in from the stone steps above on the left, soundlessly. A little light comes in only from outside the half-open doors above the stone steps, and the reflected light indicates that the force of the water is quite strong.

He is pedaling on a bicycle and the wheels are turning at a medium pace. He is riding an ancient bicycle with wide handlebars, traveling along a narrow village highway. In the distance on the left is a big stretch of grassland on a slight incline where there is a line of four people, backs
bent, who seem to be pulling hard on something. What they are pulling isn’t clear, but it is something very heavy that looks like a wooden boat yet could be a coffin, and leaves a track in the grass wherever they pass. Their every step is slow and strained. Wafting through the air is a woman’s wail, like song and lament, like the wailing of a Chinese peasant woman at a funeral.

The sun reflecting off the bell on the bicycle handlebars hurts his eyes, and the wailing seems more and more like the songs or hauling chants of coolie workers. The wheels of the bicycle turn along the straight asphalt road.

Four gaunt men with purplish bronze faces, sweating backs, and bare upper torsos are wearing wide cloth waistbands and straw sandals. As he looks at the rope, which appears to be taut, there is a sudden loud snap.

A motor car overtakes the bicycle, and speeds off. As he turns his head to look back, the sun directly over the left side of the field is blinding. No one is around and the lingering sound seems to be either the cry of insects or his ears ringing.

In the underground cellar, the mattress is soaked in the black water. The white sheet is also saturated, and the man with a hat over his face is stiff and looks like a corpse. Water keeps dripping from above, and there is now also the pop of bursting bubbles.

With the bicycle parked nearby, he lies on his side in the shade of a tree, looking at this neglected apple orchard. Here and there among the branches are a few red
apples that had escaped being picked. Not too far away is the gurgling of a creek.

A barefoot girl appears under the apple trees ahead. She is carrying a bucket of water that seems too heavy for her. Her purplish red jacket has a single slanting lapel, and the legs of her blue floral-print trousers are rolled up to just below the knees. She has two long plaits, and her bright black eyes look too big for her small face. She gives a start, uncertain whether or not to keep walking. Suddenly it is lonely all around.

A small tree is drifting in the wind. Dirt splashes up, and billowing clouds of thick black smoke and dust suddenly spread through the sky. Then, as planes swoop overhead, the strafing of machine guns, exploding bombs, and, immediately afterward, the crying of babies and the wailing of women can be heard.

Several small boys squat around an iron spade, watching it sink into the ground as a foot treads down on it. A clod of earth is dug up and flattened into small pieces with the spade, then another clod of earth is dug up and flattened, and yet another. A big boy stoops to pick up a machine-gun bullet, brushes it on his shirt, puts it into his trouser pocket, then takes the spade to another hole nearby to dig. One of the small boys surrounding him shakes his head as he looks at the row of holes in the ground.

The murky black water makes a gurgling sound as it flows down all the stone steps, unstoppably.

A match is struck in the dark and a yellowing, slightly
faded old photograph is set alight. It is the photograph of a young man in a suit and tie and a young woman in a
qipao
together with a three- or four-year-old boy. Their shoulders pressed together, both the adults have posed smiles on their faces. The eyes of the boy between the parents are rounded, and he has a surprised look. The flames on the edge of the photograph are burning toward his parents. The photograph is shrinking and beginning to curl up, then—
whoosh!
—the whole photograph is burning, his parents are alight and the child is charred.

A bubble keeps growing as it is blown. The soapy surface is moving faster and with the sun shining on it, the colors become brighter, more colorful, more sparkling, until it can’t get any bigger. It silently bursts as amazement lights up the face of the little boy blowing bubbles.

The mattress in the black water slowly begins to float up. It tilts slightly, wobbles back, sways a few times, each time becoming steadier, and eventually it is floating on the water.

Water is dripping everywhere. He looks up at the rainwater coming down from the eaves; outside on the ground there are some abandoned iron plows and farm machine parts. Two dogs charge at him with their jaws wide open. He retreats into the granary, where the ceiling is high and bundles of fodder are stacked right up to it. There is a long wooden bench in the middle of the dark granary and young women are sitting around it. All of them have flour
sticking to different parts of their faces: eyelids, nose, eyebrows, cheeks, lips, ears. Heads bowed, they shape lumps of dough in their hands as they chant, engrossed in grief. However, a young woman with long plaits has an oil lamp with a shade in front of her. She is looking into a mirror at her woman companion behind who has untied her plaits and is combing her hair for her. Without realizing it, he is right by the mirror and sees the scissors cut her long hair short. Immediately, the barking of dogs is heard.