Song of Everlasting Sorrow (51 page)

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Authors: Wang Anyi

BOOK: Song of Everlasting Sorrow
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“What do you make of this one?” Jiang Lili’s eyes glimmered with sharp brightness and her voice took on a shrill new tone. Wang Qiyao couldn’t help feeling apprehensive; she went to take the binder from Jiang Lili’s hands so that she wouldn’t be able to read any more. But Jiang Lili resisted, and in the course of their struggle she even scratched the back of Wang Qiyao’s hand, drawing blood. But even then neither would give up; Wang Qiyao insisted on taking the binder away from her and even pushed her back down on the bed. As she struggled, Jiang Lili’s laughter eventually dissolved into tears, which flowed copiously down her cheeks from behind her glasses.
“You’re just the same as him! You both want to hurt me! You both say you want to see how I’m doing, but all you do is provoke me!”
Stung by the injustice of her remarks, Wang Qiyao momentarily forgot that she was talking to a dying woman.
“Well, you can rest easy because
I
will never marry him!” Wang Qiyao shouted in agitation.
Jiang Lili too became agitated. “Go ahead and marry him. Why should I care? What sort of person do you take me for, anyway?”
“Jiang Lili . . .” Wang Qiyao spoke through her tears. “It’s not worth it. Don’t throw your life away for a man. How could you be so foolish?”
Jiang Lili’s tears were coming down in a steady stream. “Well, let me tell you, Wang Qiyao. . . . It’s the two of you who have ruined my life, totally ruined it!”
Wang Qiyao couldn’t suppress the desire to console her; she reached out to hug her.
“Jiang Lili, do you think I don’t know? Do you think he doesn’t know?”
At first Jiang Lili tried to push her away, but Wang Qiyao pulled her back into her arms and held her tight. They embraced and both were crying so hard that they could barely breathe.
“Wang Qiyao, I have had such wretched luck . . . such wretched luck!” Jiang Lili sobbed.
“If your luck is wretched, then how about me?”
All their pent-up bitterness surged up from deep inside them. But, alas, all of that was water under the bridge, and there was no way anything could be undone.
Neither knew how long they sat crying and hugging like that; their bodies ached from so much crying. Eventually, it was the smell of Jiang Lili’s breath—a sweet fishiness that carried the stench of rot—that reminded Wang Qiyao that her friend was dying. Swallowing her grief and holding back her tears, she let go of Jiang Lili and gently laid her back down in bed before going to get a hot towel to wipe her face. Jiang Lili continued to cry; there seemed to be no end to her river of tears. By then it was starting to get dark outside. At the wineshop, Mr. Cheng had drunk himself into a stupor and was slumped over on the table, unable to get up. He heard the sound of the ferry in the distance and, in his drunken daze, thought he had boarded and was gradually pulling away from the shore. He could almost see the vast ocean, boundless, as it spread out around him.
The exultations and lamentations of 1965 were all like this, grand in an insignificant way. Tempests in a teacup, they yet had a beginning and an end, and were enough to take up a whole lifetime. The noises they made were petty and weak; even exerting their greatest effort, they were unable to make the sound carry. Only when holding one’s breath could one hear the faint buzzing and droning, but each sound was enough to last a lifetime. Gaining strength in numbers, they converge into a large mass hovering over the city sky. They form what is known as a “silent sound,” which sings its melody above the raucous noises of the city. One calls it a “silent sound” because it is tremendously dense and enormously large, its size and density equal to if not exceeding its “silence.” The same method is found in traditional Chinese landscape paintings, where shading and texture in rocks and mountains are created by using light strokes of ink. And so, this “silent sound” is, in truth, the greatest of all sounds, because it is where sound itself begins.
Just one week after their meeting, Jiang Lili’s spleen ruptured and she died of a massive hemorrhage. At the time of her death she was surrounded by Old Zhang, her three sons, and the whole family from Shandong. She had been in a coma before she died and did not leave any last words. At the factory where she used to work, a memorial service was held in which she was remembered for her courage in breaking off relations with her family from the exploiting class and for never giving up her dream of joining the Communist Party. Neither her parents nor her brother attended the memorial service. Apparently they realized that their presence would constitute a stain on Jiang Lili’s lifelong ideals. But her family did hold all of the traditional funerary rites, from the “initial seven,” performed over the first seven days after her death, to the “double seven.” The “double seven” was held every seventh day, ending with the seventh ceremony, which took place on the forty-ninth day after her passing. During each ceremony, the family would sit together, sometimes in silence and sometimes quietly talking, creating an atmosphere of understanding and forgiveness. Jiang Lili, however, was gone forever and fated never to share in the tranquility of their communion.
Mr. Cheng and Wang Qiyao did not attend the memorial service; they actually did not find out about Jiang Lili’s death until after it had taken place. By the time they learned of her death, they seemed to have gotten over the terrible grief they had been feeling and were more relieved than anything else: Jiang Lili was now released from her pain. They themselves had nothing worth celebrating, but they were the kind of people who had grown accustomed to making concessions to reality. They knew how to be satisfied with whatever cards life dealt them, unlike Jiang Lili, for whom life was a constant struggle, because she always refused to conform, always stubbornly insisting on doing things her own way, all the way to the bitter end. The two decided, each without letting the other know, to pay special homage to Jiang Lili, but both chose the same day to carry out their memorial, waiting until Tomb-Sweeping Festival of the following year. Mr. Cheng went alone to Longhua Temple and swept the ground in front of the vault where Jiang Lili’s ashes were kept. Wang Qiyao waited until the middle of the night when everyone was asleep before she burned a cut-out of spirit paper for her lost friend. Although she did not believe in such superstitious practices—neither did Jiang Lili—it provided small fraction of comfort in an otherwise helpless situation. What else could she have done?
At the memorial service Jiang Lili’s mother-in-law’s incessant wailing almost drowned out the eulogies delivered by the factory leaders. Her weeping evoked a chorus of answering tears; the mournful wails of the family from the countryside gave the entire service a feeling of genuine sorrow.
All That Remains Is the Tower Whence It Flew
 
Mr. Cheng was among of the first batch of people to commit suicide in the summer of 1966. Looking back on the previous year, all the nonstop merriment seemed like a bad omen; when the cup overflows, disaster follows. But the coming storm was something that took most city dwellers completely unaware. Only a few people of the older generation sensed what was to come and had been quietly brewing. Thus one might say that the gaiety of 1965 was only enjoyed by those common city dwellers who did not sense the danger in the air. To them, the catastrophe of the following summer came out of the blue. Strangely enough, the oleander blossoms in the
longtang
that summer were as gorgeous as they had ever been; the gardenias, magnolias, tuberoses, impatiens, and roses were in bloom everywhere, filling the air with their fragrance. Only the pigeons were on edge. They would rise abruptly from the rooftops, tracing circles in the sky before returning briefly to their rooftop perches, only to fly away again in panic. They stayed in flight until their wings were nearly broken and blood almost ran from their eyes; they had witnessed too much. No tragic scene—whether causes or consequences—escaped their eyes.
Longtang
alleys of all shapes and sizes ran all over the city, and it was during the summer of 1966 that the red- and black-tiled rooftops riddled with protruding dormer windows and concrete terraces were all pried open suddenly, their secrets laid bare for everyone to see. These secrets, conciliatory or compromising, damp and moldy, reeking of rat piss, were in the process of rotting away, destined to become so much fertilizer to provide nourishment for new lives—because even the most insignificant of lives must pay the price of sacrifice. These secrets, light but copious, could creep between the bricks and through the cracks in the walls, dispersing throughout the city’s air. But before anyone could notice the stench of their decay, they would already have transformed themselves, giving rise to new life. Now, when what lay underneath all those rooftops was revealed, the scene was shocking. Dubious tales, unveiled, went on to pollute the city’s air. One such tale told of a headstrong girl who, failing to heed the family rules, was locked away for twenty years. By the time she was released, she could no longer walk, her hair had grown gray, and her eyes could no longer withstand the sunlight. Who could have imagined that hidden beneath these rooftops lay private prisons, no better than rat holes, where prisoners scurried around in the dark?
This was also the setting in 1966 for the Great Cultural Revolution, which played out in the streets of the
longtang
of Shanghai. The revolution was a force that swept away everything in its path; it had the power to touch people down to their very souls. It penetrated into the hidden hearts of the city. From this point forward there was no place to hide, everything was caught in its grip. Those hidden hearts had largely relied upon the cover of darkness provided by the city in order to survive. Although they existed in secret, unknown to most, they were the greater part of what kept the city alive—its life-force. They were like the submerged portion of an iceberg. The city’s brilliant lights that sparkled in the night, and the bustling activities carried out during its day, all had their foundations in these secrets; these secrets were the fuel that fed the flames of the life on the surface, only no one saw them. Well, now that the curtains have been torn open, these hearts are already half dead. Don’t just look at the dark, corrupted side of these hearts, for within they are shy, sensitive, and full of humility; they can endure suffering but not being exposed. You could almost call this a sense of dignity.
That summer all of the city’s secrets were laid bare, paraded throughout the streets. Due to the size and variety of the population, the secrets accumulated over the previous hundred years in this city exceeded what most cities accrue in a thousand. Just one secret wouldn’t have amounted to anything, but, put together, the whole was massive—a huge secret. These were secrets that could not be spoken, they were secrets that could not even be revealed through tears; these secrets were the beginning—and the end—to so many songs of joy and sorrow. Look, if you will, at the shattered glass vessels, the smashed antique porcelain, and the books, phonograph records, high-heeled shoes, and store signs all going up in flames! Look at the mahogany furniture, men and women’s clothing, pianos and violins that, virtually overnight, ended up piled high at all the second-hand stores! These are the leftover carcasses of those secrets, the fossilized remains of people’s private lives. You could also see the torn photographs scattered about the garbage cans; the torn faces in the ripped pictures looked like ghosts of the wrongly accused. In the end, actual corpses did appear, strewn along the crowded city streets.
Once all the secrets were exposed, the sediments that had been dug up along with them floated through the air, and gossip proliferated. The stories of illicit passions that we heard were only half true. And although we only half believe them, that does not stop us from perpetuating them. The alleys, lanes, streets, and roads of the city were all enveloped in a living hell. The gossip that was released had been chewed over by the toughest of tongues, which twisted and warped the words until they were unrecognizable even to the speakers themselves. You should never wholeheartedly believe the gossip you hear, but neither should you completely discount such rumors; because underneath the sensationalism there is always a grain of truth. That grain of truth is, in fact, quite simple, because it always stems from human nature—it all depends on how you listen to what you hear.
Thousands of monstrous people and events seemed to be born overnight. From the placid waters of yesterday to the terrifying calamities of today, everything was instantly transformed. You need only look at the black-and-white big-character posters displayed beside the road. Then there were the crudely printed colored handbills tossed down from high buildings, which scattered throughout the city. Those alone were enough to leave one completely confused as to what was happening. The city’s heart had been warped beyond all recognition; its eyes too had gone askew, so that no matter what it looked at, nothing was what it had once seemed to be.
The roof hanging over Mr. Cheng’s world was also torn open. In this new era he was made into a cunning special agent; his camera was his weapon and the women who came calling to have their portraits taken were actually his stable of spies, whom he personally trained to seduce victims and extract their secrets. That summer practically any plot was plausible. The floor of his apartment was ripped out and the walls smashed, but the mystery surrounding him only deepened. He was interrogated for several days and nights, but they couldn’t get anything out of him. In the end they locked him up in the toilet of an institution for an entire month. During that month, Mr. Cheng was reduced to a zombie. All he did was eat, sleep, and write confessions, all in accordance with the whim of his captors. His mind became a blank. All night long he had to put up with the dripping sound of the leaking toilet, which was like an hourglass counting off the time.

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