she couldn’t go on writing. She looked up to see rain beating against the window. Outside, the gorgeous sun shone high in the sky. Where had the rain come from? She walked outside and discovered that the young boy wearing leaves was pouring water on her window with a watering can.
Liujin was both annoyed and amused. She charged up, grabbed his watering can, and berated him: “You aren’t selling tea leaves. You’ve come here to make trouble. Where do you live? What’s your name?” The kid didn’t answer; he was still staring at the old-fashioned watering can. A mischievous idea struck Liujin. She raised the watering can and poured water over the boy’s head. He stood there, unmoving, as she watered him thoroughly. He mopped his wet face with his hand, and looked curiously at the furnishings in her house.
“Go in and change your clothes.”
Taking the boy’s hand, Liujin went inside with him.
She told him to go to the bathroom and take a bath. She got out her father’s old shirt and a pair of underpants for him.
But the child bathed for a long time without emerging. Suspicious, Liujin knocked on the door. There was no answer. She opened the door: he had left, maybe by climbing out the window. The old clothes were still lying on the chair.
Liujin sat down, stupefied, at the desk, and said to the wall in front of her, “Look at how lonely I am.” But without knowing why, she wrote in the letter, “. . . Mama, life here is rich and colorful!” She’d been writing that letter for a long time, and she kept feeling she couldn’t go on writing. She couldn’t picture her mother’s face. Who was she really writing to? Had her mother really written back, ever? Inside Liujin’s drawer were many letters from her mother. She was convinced that the words didn’t convey her mother’s ideas, but were from the dark shadow behind her mother—her father—because her mother had never paid attention to her. But the letters were actually in her mother’s writing. For the most part, the letters didn’t ask about her life, but simply described Father’s and her hopes for old age. “Your father and I hope to walk around the city on a rainy day.” “We hope to come back to the snow mountain and talk with the snow leopards.” “We hope we can melt into a wisp of black smoke in this smoky city.” “Today we swam in the river. We wanted to be able to walk on water through exercising.” “We . . . we will not vanish, not ever.” But words like these were inserted into much longer letters, in the middle of confused descriptions of the city. Only someone like Liujin could extract their meaning. Now and then, she would ask herself: What is this correspondence for? Her parents didn’t seem to think of her at all, nor did they care whether or not she married: they hadn’t even asked about this. However, another kind of concern showed up between the lines or in ambiguous expressions. Then after all, they still thought about this daughter. What was it that they were concerned about? Liujin couldn’t figure it out; she just felt bewildered. So when she took up her pen, she wrote strange words. When she wrote them, what she thought of were the poplar grove, the filthy sheep, the mysterious woman in the red skirt, and the old man twisting hemp in the starlight. “Mama, I, I am not one person!” Not one person? How many persons was she? She remembered an adventure from her childhood. She and her father had gone to the Gobi Desert. The whole time, they had walked along the periphery of the Gobi. Suddenly, dozens of sand birds dropped from the sky and fell onto their heads, shoulders, and next to their feet. The little things chirped, and pecked their heads and clothes, as if they had a grievance against them. Liujin noticed that in the blink of an eye the golden-red sun had darkened and the wind had picked up. Many people were shouting her and her father’s names. That was the first time that she, at the age of twelve, had found herself surrounded by a lot of invisible people. Waving her hands, she vigorously drove the birds away. She felt completely at a loss. As for her father, he unexpectedly left her and walked alone toward the west. An inner darkness struck her: she thought she was going to be abandoned in this rough, barren land. The birds had arrived suddenly, and they vanished just as suddenly. “Hey—” she shouted desperately. Thank God, Father reappeared before long: hands behind him, he walked calmly toward her, as though nothing had happened. Now, as she wrote this sentence, she heard a reverberation at the earth’s core. She felt that Pebble Town was a slumbering city. Every day, some people and things were revived in the wind. They came to life suddenly and unexpectedly. That’s right. Liujin recalled her neighbors, she recalled her several lovers who were struggling in loneliness, she recalled Mr. Sherman whom she hadn’t known long. It was as though each of them had emerged from the earth’s core: they came with some features of old times that were incomprehensible to her. Thinking of these enigmas, she didn’t know how to go on writing her letter. “The wind blows as usual, the sun rises as usual.” As if in a fit of pique, she wrote, “How many more things will emerge from the grottoes in the snow mountain?” With this inexplicable question, she ended the letter. Someone entered the room. It was the girl Xiyu. In profile, there was nothing wrong with Xiyu’s lips. How come? And looking again from the front, you still didn’t notice anything wrong until she started talking.
“Sister Liujin, have you ever seen Mongolian wolves?”
Liujin noticed the dark hole in her little mouth and turned her head away so that she wouldn’t have to see it.
“I, I have to go to the post office,” she said as she tidied the desk.
Xiyu climbed onto the desk, and turned her mouth toward Liujin again, as though forcing her to look at it.
“A Mongolian wolf carried my little brother off in its mouth.”
“You’re hallucinating.” Liujin glanced at her and went on, “There aren’t any Mongolian wolves here. Mongolia is far away. As for your little brother, I saw him this morning. He was nursing at your mother’s breast.”
“He was nursing? I was thinking just now that a wolf had carried him off.”
She dangled her two thin legs from the desk, and cupped her chin in her hands and worried. Earlier, Liujin had wanted to ask her about the boy wearing leaves. Looking at her now, she gave up that idea.
What immense, weighty worries were packed into this little girl’s heart? How did she get through each day? But Liujin also felt that the little girl wasn’t pessimistic.
“Oh, sister Liujin, I saw them. A lot of them are in your house!”
“Who?”
“Mongolian wolves. Their shadows are all over the wall on this side. One is really large. It’s like a hill squatting there.”
“I have to go to the post office.”
The girl jumped down and ran out. Lost in thought, Liujin sealed the letter and stamped it, but she didn’t feel like going out to mail it. This little imp Xiyu had reminded her of something. Liujin had never seen Mongolian wolves, but as a child, she had heard many legends about them—most about carrying off children and bringing them up in a pack of wolves. She wondered if the wolves seen recently in the market had been Mongolian wolves. Had they crossed the snow mountain and come here? The children of Pebble Town were always fooling around on the streets, even late at night. So it wouldn’t be surprising if they had been carried off by wolves. Perhaps the older children had been eaten, and the little ones had become wolf children. Liujin found these thoughts fascinating and began imagining the lives of the wolf children.
The letter lay conspicuously on the table. Looking at it, Liujin started connecting it with the wolves. In her imagination, Mongolian wolves also showed up in Smoke City. What fun it would be if her wizened father galloped on a wolf’s back. “Dad, Dad, you mustn’t get down!” she shouted to herself. This vision gave Liujin some faith in the letter she had just written. She slipped it into her handbag and made up her mind to go to the post office. When she locked the door, something stirred inside the house.
