nothing there, is there?” he loudly berated me as if I were deliberately being a nuisance.
“But then how can those other X-rays be explained?” I couldn’t stop myself asking.
“If there’s nothing there, there’s nothing there, it’s just vanished. How can it be explained? Colds and lung inflammation can cause a shadow and when you get better, the shadow disappears.”
But I hadn’t asked him about a person’s state of mind. Could that cause a shadow?
“Go and live properly, young man.” He swivelled his chair around, dismissing me.
He was right, I had won a new lease of life, I was younger than a new-born baby.
My brother rushed off on his bicycle, he had a meeting to attend.
The sunshine was mine again, mine again to enjoy. My schoolmate and I sat on chairs by the grass and started discussing fate. It is when there is no need to discuss fate that people talk more about fate.
“Fate’s a strange thing,” he said, “a purely chance phenomenon. The possible arrangement of the chromosomes can be worked out, but can it be worked out prior to falling into the womb on a particular occasion?” He talked on endlessly. He was studying genetic engineering but the findings of the experiments he wrote up in his dissertation differed from those of his supervisor who was the head of the department. When called up for a discussion with the party general-secretary of the department, he had an argument, and after graduating he was sent to raise deer on a deer-breeding farm on the Daxinganling Plateau of Inner Mongolia.
Later on, after many setbacks, he managed to get a teaching position in a newly-established university in Tangshan. However, how could it have been foreseen that he would be labelled the claws and teeth of anti-revolutionary black group elements and hauled out for public criticism. He suffered for almost ten years before the verdict “case unsubstantiated” was declared.
He was transferred out of Tianjin just ten days before the big earthquake of 1976. Those who had trumped up the case against him were crushed to death in a building which collapsed, it was in the middle of the night and not one of them escaped.
“Within the dark chaos, naturally there is fate!” he said.
For me, however, what I had to ponder was this: How should I change this life for which I had just won a reprieve?
A village lies up ahead. At the bottom of the terraced fields and the mountain, the same black bricks and tiles dot the riverside. A stream flowing right in front of the village is spanned by a long flat slab of rock. Once again you see a black cobblestone street with a deep single-wheel rut leading into the village. And again you hear the patter of bare feet on the stones, as wet footprints guide you into the village. Again, just like the one in your childhood, it’s a small lane with mud-splashed cobblestones. You discover through gaps in the cobblestones that the lapping stream flows under the street. At the gate of each house a flagstone has been lifted so that the water can be used for washing and scrubbing, and bits of green vegetable float along the glistening ripples. Behind the front gates you make out the noisy pecking and flapping of chickens squabbling over food in the courtyards. There is no-one in the lane, there are no children, nor are there any dogs about. It is strangely quiet.
The sun over the tops of the houses shines onto a whitewashed heat-retaining wall and produces a lot of glare, but it’s quite cool in the lane. A mirror flashes from a lintel, the Eight Trigrams are etched around the border. When you go up and stand under the eave by the door you notice that this Eight Trigram mirror is directed at the curled roof of the heat-retaining wall opposite to deflect the evil forces emanating from it. However if you position yourself here to take a photograph, the visual contrast of colours — the golden glow of the wall in the intense sunlight, the grey-blue shadows of the lane and the black cobblestones on the road — is pleasing and gives a sense of tranquillity, while the broken tiles on the curled roof and the cracks in the brick wall evoke a feeling of nostalgia. If you reposition yourself you can photograph the door, the Eight Trigram mirror and the stone threshold, worn and shiny from the bottoms of the little children who have sat upon it, all with great authenticity yet showing no trace of the animosity existing for generations between the families living in the two houses.
You tell barbaric and terrifying tales and I don’t want to hear them, she says.
Then what would you like to hear about?
Talk about nice people and nice happenings.
Shall I talk about the zhuhuapo?
I don’t want to hear about shamans.
A zhuhuapo isn’t the same as a shaman, shamans are wicked old women. A zhuhuapo is a beautiful young woman.
Like Second Master’s bandit wife. I don’t want to hear cruel stories like that.
A zhuhuapo is charming and kind hearted.
She’s walking in leather shoes on moss-covered rocks and you say she doesn’t have a hope of getting very far, so she lets you hold her hand. You’ve warned her but she slips. You grab her and draw her into your arms, saying you didn’t do this on purpose. She says you’re bad and frowns but there’s the hint of a smile at the corners of her tightly pursed lips. You can’t restrain yourself and you kiss her, her lips relax and surprise you with their tenderness. You enjoy her warmth and fragrance and say that this often happens in the mountains. She entices you and you succumb and she nestles in your arms, closes her eyes.
All right, tell me then.
Tell you what?
Tell me about the zhuhuapo.
They specialize in enticing men where the road suddenly bends on the dark side of mountains, often in pavilions on mountain tops …
Have you ever seen one?
Of course. She was sitting sedately on the stone bench of a pavilion built on a mountain road so that the road ran between the two stone benches of the pavilion. To go through you had to pass her. She was a young mountain woman wearing a pale blue fine-weave cotton jacket with knot-buttons running down the ribs to the waist and white binding on the collar and sleeves. A wax-dyed cloth was wound intricately into a turban on her head. You involuntarily slowed down and sat yourself on the stone bench opposite. Without turning, she casually looked you over. Her black eyebrows had been drawn with a charred willow twig and her thin lips pouted. She knew quite well that she was alluring and didn’t try to hide it. When eyes flash so provocatively it is inevitably the man who feels awkward. Anyway it was you who felt uncomfortable first and you got up to leave. But on this mountain road on the dark side of the mountain with no-one is sight, she immediately cast a spell over you. Of course you know that you must show more respect than love to this seductive and beautiful zhuhuapo and that while you can want her you mustn’t dare be rash. You say that you heard this from stone masons who were on the mountain gathering rocks. You spent a whole night drinking and talking about women with them in their work shed. You say that you couldn’t take her to such a place to stay overnight, if a woman went it would be certain disaster, only a zhuhuapo could keep those stone masons in check. They said that zhuhuapo know the meridian points of the body, an art handed down over many generations and that their delicate hands can cure complicated illnesses which men can’t,
