The Seventh Day (23 page)

I didn’t tell him about the newspaper and the report on Li Qing’s suicide, for that would be too long a story. Maybe on some other occasion I would take him through it all, slowly.

Tan Jiaxin was still struggling with an uneasy conscience. He explained why, after the kitchen fire began, they had to block the front door and try to have the customers pay before leaving. The restaurant had been operating in the red for three years in a row.

“I must have been crazy,” he said. “I ruined myself, I ruined my family, and I ruined you.”

“Coming here is not so bad,” I said. “My dad’s here too.”

“Your dad’s here?” Tan Jiaxin was pleased. “Why didn’t you come together?”

“I haven’t found him yet,” I said. “But I have the feeling he’s not far away.”

“Once you find him, be sure to bring him here,” Tan Jiaxin said.

“I’ll be sure to do that,” I said.

Tan Jiaxin sat down opposite me, no longer with a frown on his face but wreathed in smiles. As he got up to leave, he urged me once more to bring my father to taste their dishes.

Then I settled my bill. A skeletal girl came over—a new hire, I assumed. “The noodles are eleven yuan,” she said. “The fruit is compliment
ary.”

“Here’s twenty,” I said.

“Here’s your change,” she said.

Again, an exchange of words was all that was involved. As I turned to leave, this skeletal girl called to me warmly, “Good to see you! Please come again!”

In front of a verdant bamboo grove, a skeleton wearing a black armband came over to me. I noticed a little hole in his forehead and realized that I’d seen him before. I smiled at him and he smiled too. His smile was not a mobile expression of feeling as much as a light breeze wafting from his vacant eyes and empty mouth.

“There’s a bonfire over there,” he said. “See, over there.”

I looked into the far distance, in the direction of his outstretched finger. A broad meadow spread almost as far as the eye could see, and where the meadow ended there was something bright and glistening, like a silk sash—it looked to me like a river. A green fire was blazing far off in the distance, like the little flame that burns when one flicks on a cigarette lighter. Skeletal people were coming down the hillside and out of the woods, and I could see a number of little groups heading toward the fire.

“How about we go over and join them?” he suggested.

“What’s going on there?” I asked.

“There’s a bonfire by the river,” he said.

“Do they often go there?”

“Not often, but every now and then.”

“Everyone here goes?”

“No.” He glanced at my armband and pointed at his own. “Just people like us.”

I understood now. Over there was where self-mourners would congregate. I nodded and followed him toward the bonfire and the silk-sash river. The grass whispered as we wended our way.

I looked at his black armband. “How do you come to be here?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s a long story,” he said.

A note of remembrance appeared in his voice. “I’d been married a couple of years then. My wife had a mental illness, but I didn’t realize that before we married, because I had met her only three times. I did sense something a bit odd about her smile, and it made me feel a little uneasy. But my parents weren’t at all concerned, and her family circumstances were good, with a large dowry and twenty thousand yuan in the bank. The village where I’m from is very poor, and it’s parents who make decisions when it comes to choosing a marriage partner. With that kind of money you can build a two-story house. So my parents went ahead with the match, and it was only later that it became clear she was mentally disturbed.

“She wasn’t that terrible—she didn’t hit me or make a fuss—but she’d spend the whole day laughing at this and that and got absolutely nothing done. My parents regretted their decision and felt they’d let me down, but they wouldn’t let me get a divorce, saying that the house had already been built and it wouldn’t do to dump her after profiting from her wealth. I hadn’t been thinking of divorce, either, and preferred just to carry on as we were doing. She was gentle and quiet as mental cases go, sleeping peacefully at night like any normal person.

“One summer day she went off by herself—I don’t think she had any idea where she was going. I went out to look for her, and so did my parents and my brother and sister-in-law. We looked all over the place and made inquiries everywhere, but could find no trace of her. After three days of futile searching, we went to tell her family. They jumped to the conclusion that I must have murdered her, and they went to the local public security bureau to report their suspicions.

“Five days after she left home, a woman’s body floated to the surface of a pond a mile from our village. It being the height of summer, the corpse was already decomposed and unrecogniz
able. The police called me and my wife’s relatives in to try to make an identifica
tion, but none of us could be sure, at most simply noting a similarity in heights. The police said the drowning happened on the day she left home, and to me this suggested strongly that it must be my wife, and her family felt the same. She must have stumbled carelessly into the pond, I thought, for she wouldn’t have realized the danger of drowning. It upset me, for whatever else you say about it, we had been husband and wife for over two years.

“A couple of days later, the policemen came back to ask what I was doing the day my wife left. I’d gone into town that morning and it was evening when I got home and discovered she was gone. The police asked if anyone could testify that I had gone into town. I thought that over and said no. They took notes and left. Her family was convinced I had killed her and the police thought so too, so they arrested me.

“At the outset, my parents and my brother and his wife didn’t believe I killed her, but later, when I admitted I had, they were finally convinced. They were very upset and hated me for shaming them so much—they couldn’t raise their heads. That’s what our village is like: if there’s a murderer in the family, nobody dares to venture out of the house. When the court sentenced me to death not one of them was in attendance, and it was only her family who came. I don’t bear them any grudge. After I was arrested, they wanted to visit me but the police wouldn’t let them. They’re all honest, simple people, and they had no idea I was unjustly accused.

“I had no choice but to say I’d done it. The police strung me up and beat me, insisting I confess, beating me till I was shitting and pissing in my pants. My hands were tied tightly for two whole days and four of my fingers went black—I’d never be able to use them again, I was told. Later, they strung me up by my feet instead, with my head pointing down. When you get beaten that way, it’s not your body that hurts most, but your eyes. Tears are salty, and they can be as painful as a needle stabbing you in the eyes. I thought I’d be better off dead, so I admitted the crime.”

He paused for a moment. “You know why we have eyebrows?”

“Why?”

“To block sweat.”

I heard him chuckle as he smiled to himself.

He pointed at the back of his head, then at the round hole in his forehead. “The bullet came in the back, and this is where it came out.”

He looked down at his black armband. “When I got here, I noticed that some people were wearing armbands for themselves, and I wanted to do the same. I felt nobody back there would wear an armband for me—certainly nobody in my family. I saw someone with a long, loose black jacket. I asked him if he would mind tearing off a piece of sleeve for me. He understood what I had in mind, and complied. With a black armband I feel at ease.

“Someone who came over later filled me in on what happened subsequently. Six months after I was shot, my wife suddenly returned home. Her clothes were ragged and torn, and her face was so filthy nobody could recognize her. She stood outside the front door cackling happily away, and eventually someone put two and two together.

“Everyone finally realized that I had been wrongly convicted. My parents and my brother and sister-in-law all wept for two days straight, so upset were they. The government gave them compensation to the tune of five hundred thousand yuan, and they bought a fine grave for me—”

“You have a burial site?” I asked. “Why are you still here?”

“At first, when I heard the news, I took off my armband and tossed it under a tree, preparing to head there straightaway. But before I’d gone ten yards, I felt I couldn’t bear to leave here, so I went back and put the armband on again. Now I don’t feel like going.”

“You don’t want to go to the place of rest?”

“No, I do,” he said. “My thought at the time was that I have a burial spot all lined up, so there’s no big hurry—I can go there whenever I feel like it.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Eight years now.”

“Is the burial plot still there?”

“Yes, it always has been.”

“When do you plan to go?”

“Sometime in the future.”

We walked to the gathering place of the self-mourners. Before my eyes there stretched a broad river—the gleaming scene had also broadened. A green bonfire was blazing vigorously on the riverbank, and the leaping sparks looked like dancing glowworms.