The Seventh Day (10 page)

My father was speechless. The cheerful glow that lit up his features gave way at once to a stiff, pained expression, and that look of distress, rather than passing quickly, settled on his face for some time. His emotions were in turmoil, for he was now deeply in love with the girl, while loving me, of course, too. These were two different kinds of love, and he needed to choose one and abandon the other.

Actually, the young woman wasn’t really rejecting me out of hand—she was simply being pragmatic. She was twenty-eight, which in those days counted as very late to be single, and it meant she didn’t have many choices of men. In her eyes my father was strong in all department
s—his only drawback was that he had adopted a foundling. She pictured how in the future they would have children of their own, and it seemed to her that fitting me into the family would be an awkward proposition. So that’s why she said what she did: if they didn’t have me to worry about, things would go more smoothly. She wasn’t wrong to think that way: they might well have more than two children, and to have a foundling to care for too would impose a heavy burden on a couple with a limited income. Even so, she still accepted my existence—she just felt that my father should have left me with an orphanage at the outset. She was just saying.

My father tended to have a one-track mind, and if an idea that he was set on found obstacles in its way, he would be unable to think of an alternative. And so the idea got fixed in his head that she would never go along with a package deal. Perhaps he was right, for even if she could have brought herself to accept me, in the long run I would have been a flash point for conflict and strife. My father was like a wet towel dripping with emotions: she and I had seized opposite ends of the towel and were wringing it with all our might, and his heart was in torment.

I had no inkling of his struggle and no awareness that now, when my father looked at me, it was with pity and not with joy. If anything, during these days he seemed to be all the more devoted to me. Although I was now steady on my feet, my father would carry me in his arms as though I couldn’t walk properly, and he would put his face close to mine. Always a bit of a penny-pincher, now every day he would buy me two candies, one of which he would slip into my mouth, the other of which he would pop into one of my pockets.

Much as he found it difficult to part from me emotionally, in his mind he was steadily moving in a different direction. Now twenty-five, one way or another my father needed a woman in his life. He loved me, but he needed a woman’s love even more. After much agonizing, he chose her and abandoned me.

Early one morning I woke up to find my father sitting on the bed. He leaned over and said softly, “Yang Fei, let’s go on a train ride.”

Although I had lived four years next to a busy railroad line, I had never once taken a train. I stuck my nose against the windowpane: as the train began to move and I saw the people on the platform quickly receding, I gave a wail of alarm. Then I saw houses and streets retreating rapidly, and fields and ponds as well, but I noticed the farther away things were, the more slowly they retreated.

“Why is it like that?” I asked my father.

“I don’t know,” he said morosely.

At noon that day we disembarked in a small town and lunched on noodles in a little place opposite the station, my father ordering a bowl of noodles with shredded pork for me and a bowl of plain noodles for himself. I couldn’t finish such a big bowl and my father ate the leftovers. Then he had me sit while he asked directions to the orphanage. The first three people he talked to said they weren’t sure; the fourth thought for a moment and then told him where to find it.

He carried me a long way, until we arrived at a stone-slab bridge over a dry riverbed. He heard children singing in a building on the opposite bank and assumed it was the orphanage (it was actually a kindergarten). Clasped in his arms, I heard the singing too. “Dad, there are lots of kids there,” I piped up happily.

My father bowed his head and looked around. Next to the bridge was a copse of trees interspersed with rocks and clumps of grass. The biggest rock was dark and flat, and he wiped it with his hand, clearing away little stones as though burnishing a piece of metalwork with sandpaper. Once its surface was clean and shiny, he lifted me up and deposited me on the rock, then brought out a handful of candy from his pocket and put it in mine. I was delighted to see so much candy, and what pleased me even more was that he then filled my other pockets with cookies. Then he unhitched his army canteen and hung it around my neck. He stood in front of me, his eyes fixed on the ground. “I’m leaving now,” he said.

“All right,” I told him.

My father turned and left, not daring to look back. Only when he was about to disappear around a corner could he no longer restrain himself; he cast a glance back and saw me sitting on the rock and happily swinging my little legs in the air.

It was evening by the time my father arrived back in our town. After getting off the train, he did not go to his own house but presented himself at the young woman’s home. He called her out and then headed off toward the park without another word. Accustomed as she was to his taciturn ways, she followed behind. Finding the park closed, he marched around the perimeter wall until they reached a quiet spot, and there he came to a halt and told her everything he’d done that day. The young woman was stunned and even a bit frightened, finding it hard to believe that he would just abandon me like that. Then she realized that he had done this out of love for her, so she hugged him tightly and kissed him with abandon, and he hugged her back, just as tightly. Dry kindling met hot fire, and they agreed to marry the very next day. After further embraces, my father said he was tired and returned to his cabin next to the railroad.

That night he could not sleep. It was the first time the two of us had ever been separated, and he began to be anxious and afraid, not knowing where I was at that moment and not knowing whether the people at the orphanage had discovered me or not. If they hadn’t, I might well be still sitting on that rock, and maybe a wild dog would pick up my scent as the night deepened….

The following day, my father, racked with worry, walked with his fiancée toward the marriage registry office. She did not realize that a drastic shift was taking place in his mind; she was thinking only that he looked unusually worn out. When she asked tenderly why this was, and he answered that he had not slept a wink, she attributed this to excitement and a sweet smile came to her lips.

Halfway to the registry office, my father said he needed a rest. He sat down by the sidewalk and put his hands on his knees. Then he buried his head in his arms and burst out sobbing. The young woman had not expected this at all. She stood there dumbly, as a deep unease began to settle over her. Suddenly my father stood up. “I have to go,” he said. “I have to go back for Yang Fei.”

I didn’t know that I had been abandoned—he related all these scenes to me subsequently, and only later did I find traces of this episode deep in my memory. I remember that I was very happy in the beginning, for the whole afternoon I sat on that rock eating cookies and candy. When the children from the kindergarten walked past after school, I was still eating these little snacks. The children were green with envy, and I heard them tell their parents: “I want a candy,” “I want a cookie.” Later, the sky darkened and I heard a dog barking nearby and I began to feel frightened. I climbed down from the rock and hid behind it, but was still afraid, so I picked up fallen leaves and covered myself with them until even my head was concealed, and only then did I feel safe. I fell asleep under the protection of the leaves, and in the morning it was the voices of the children on their way to the kindergarten that awakened me. Between the gaps in the leaves I saw the sun come up; then I climbed back onto the rock and sat there to wait for my father. I sat for a long time and it seemed that someone came over to talk to me, but I don’t remember what the person said. Now I had no candy and no cookies and just a little water in the canteen, so when I got hungry all I could do was drink a couple of mouthfuls of water, and then there was no water either. I was hungry and thirsty and tired, so I climbed down from the rock, lay down in the long grass, heard dogs barking, and covered myself up once more with leaves from head to foot, and then I fell asleep.

My father arrived in the town at midday and ran all the way to where he had left me. From a distance he could see no sign of me. His running steps gradually slowed and he came to a halt not far from the rock, looking around despairingly. Just as he was in an agony of anxiety, he heard me murmur something in my sleep:

“How come Dad’s still not here?”

My father told me later that when he saw how I had made a quilt out of leaves, he first laughed, then wept. He pushed aside the leaves and when he picked me up out of the grass I was already awake and was calling happily, “Dad, there you are! Daddy, there you are at last!”

My father’s life and mine once more were intertwined. After this he gave up on marriage—m
eaning, first of all, that he gave up on the girl with the long braid. She was very upset and couldn’t understand it at all; she went running over to Li Yuezhen to pour out her woes. Only then did Li Yuezhen realize what had happened. She gave my father quite a talking-to, pointing out that she and Hao Qiangsheng would have been perfectly willing to adopt me, for she thought of me as her own son, since I had drunk her milk. My father nodded in embarrassment and admitted he had shown poor judgment. But when Li Yuezhen insisted that he make up with the young woman, my father dug in his heels, convinced that he had to choose between the two of us. “All I want is Yang Fei,” he insisted.

No matter how Li Yuezhen tried to persuade him, my father responded with total silence. Angry but powerless, all she could do was vow never again to involve herself in his affairs.

Later, I saw that young woman with the long braid several more times. If I spotted her in the street as my father and I were out walking together, I would tug my father’s hand and give a cheerful shout of “Auntie!” My father bowed his head and just kept on going, clutching my hand tightly. At first the young woman would still give me a smile, but later she would pretend not to have seen us and not to have heard my call. Three years later, she married a PLA company commander ten years her senior and moved as a military dependent to the faraway north.

After this my father simply devoted himself to raising me, without entertaining any further romantic aspirations. I was his everything. Relying on each other, we led a life that passed slowly at the time but in retrospect was over very quickly. He recorded my growth, having me stand up against the wall every six months and using a pencil to mark one line after another above my head. When I was in middle school, I quickly grew taller, and when he saw wider and wider gaps between the lines, a blissful smile would appear on his face.

By the time I was in the first year of high school, I was already about the same height as my father and would often beckon him with a smile on my face. He would walk over to me, chuckling, and I would stand up straight and compare our heights. As I steadily grew taller and he steadily got shorter, I continued this practice until the final year of high school, when I could clearly see the strands of white hair on the top of his head and I noticed the wrinkles on his face. With all the work of caring for me, my father looked ten years older than his actual age.

By then my father was no longer a switchman. Manually operated switches had been replaced by electric points and the railroad had become automated. It took a long time for my father to adapt to his new job as a station attendant. He enjoyed responsibi
lity, and when he was a switchman he’d invested all his attention in his work, for if he had made an error in setting the points, a major accident would have ensued. Once he became a station attendant, he had less pressure weighing on him, but the humdrum routine often made him feel that his talents were underused.