The Seventh Day (13 page)

After all the furor had died down, I stood on the balcony in the quiet of the late evening taking in the splendid night views of this northern city, and I began to miss Yang Jinbiao. Never in his life had he cursed me or beaten me; if I’d acted out of line, he would simply and gently reproach me and give a sigh as though he was the one who’d done something wrong.

The next morning the family reverted to calm, as though nothing at all had happened. After the working members had breakfast and left for their offices, only my mother and I were left sitting at the dining table. She felt embarrassed about the row, but even more she felt misused. She kept complaining, complaining about how my brother and sister and their spouses would eat and drink at her expense, never ever paying a penny for their meals; then she grumbled about how my father had too many parties after work, coming home drunk almost every single evening.

She babbled on and on. “What a mess this family is!” she said. “It’s so exhausting, managing this kind of household!”

I waited till she had finished. Then I told her gently, “I want to go home.”

She looked blank for a moment, before realizing that the home I was talking about was not hers but my other one. Tears trickled from her eyes, but she made no effort to dissuade me. “Will you come back to see me?” she said, wiping her cheeks.

I nodded.

“Things have been difficult for you here,” she said sadly.

I said nothing.

After living in this new home for twenty-seven days, I took the train back to my old home. When I got off the train, I did not leave the station, but hauled my suitcase through the underpass and looked around for my father on one platform after another. I finally saw him at the far end of platform 4, and when I approached, I found he was giving directions to a confused traveler. When the man said “Thank you” and ran to catch his train, I called out to my father, “Dad.”

He froze, and it was only when I called a second time that he turned around and looked at me in astonishment, gazing in equal amazement at my suitcase. He saw that I was wearing the clothes I wore on the day of my departure. I had returned in just the same state as I had left.

“Dad, I’m back,” I said.

He understood what this meant. He nodded slightly and the rims of his eyes reddened, then he quickly turned around and continued with his work. Looking at the clock on the platform, I could tell that he would get off work in another twenty minutes, so I lugged my bag over to the steps leading down to the underpass and stood there watching as he applied himself to his various tasks. He gave directions to several travelers, indicating where their carriages were located, and he carried bags for an elderly traveler and helped him onto his train. Once the train had pulled out, he looked up at the clock and saw that it was time to knock off, so he came up to me and, picking up my bag, went down the steps. I reached out to grab it back, but he brushed me away with his left hand. It was as though I were still a child and not strong enough to lift such a large suitcase.

I was back in my own home. By this time we had already left the shack next to the railroad line and moved into a dormitory occupied by railroad employees. There were only two rooms, but they were rooms free of argument.

My father was quite composed, despite my sudden return. Since he had not expected me back, there was nothing much to eat at home, and he suggested that I have a shower while he went to a restaurant nearby and picked up some take-out food. He seldom patronized restaurants, and for him to come back with four dishes all at once was quite a novelty. He hardly said anything as we ate, concentrating mainly on putting bits of food into my bowl with his chopsticks. I didn’t say much either, telling him simply that I felt this home of ours was the right place for me. I said it wasn’t that difficult for university graduates to find work, and a job that I found here wouldn’t be significantly inferior to the job my birth father had in mind. My father nodded as he listened, but he spoke up when I said I would start looking for a job the next day. “What’s the rush?” he said. “Take it easy for now.”

I learned later from Hao Qiangsheng that after I went to bed that night, my father paid a call on them, bursting into tears as he came in the door and announcing to him and Li Yuezhen, “Yang Fei is back! My son is back!”

In his final days my father believed that the best thing he had ever done in life was to adopt a son named Yang Fei. By that time he had retired and I was a section head in the company. I had saved some money and I planned to buy a new two-bedroom apartment. I spent a weekend with my father looking at a dozen housing developments under construction and took a liking to one particular apartment, so we planned to sell my father’s railroad dormitory unit. It had been assigned to him as one of the perks of his job, and now he was free to dispose of it as he chose. With the funds gained from its sale, combined with the money I had put aside over the years, we could purchase a new apartment cash down, without needing to pay a mortgage. My professional success offered some consolation to my father for the disappointment of my failed marriage.

During this period I had a lot of work-related engagements in the evenings, and when I returned home late I would find my father waiting for me with a full dinner on the table. If I wasn’t home, he would not eat and could not sleep. So I began to turn down as many invitations as possible and instead went home to keep my father company as he ate and watched television. During my vacation that year, I took him to Huangshan for a holiday—the first and last time that he left home for travel. At sixty, my father was still very fit, and while I was soon panting for breath as we climbed the mountain, he moved as nimbly as a swallow and was able to give me a helping hand on the steepest stretches.

Hao Qiangsheng and Li Yuezhen had also retired. Their daughter, Hao Xia, had gone to graduate school in the United States after she finished university in Beijing, then stayed on in America to work, marrying an American and bearing two attractive children. On retirement Hao and Li planned to emigrate to America, and as they waited for their green card applications to be approved they would often come to visit my father—these were his happiest moments. When I opened the door on my return from work and heard peals of laughter from inside, I knew that they were visiting. Li Yuezhen would give me a cheerful greeting, “Hi, son,” when I appeared in front of them.

Li Yuezhen had always called me “Son,” and in my mind she was the only mother I had as I grew up. When I was still sucking my thumb in the cotton sling on Yang Jinbiao’s back, she had come almost every day to our shack next to the railroad tracks to breast-feed me. “Formula is never as good as mother’s milk,” she would say to Yang Jinbiao. In my memory she had always been thin, but according to my father she had once been quite plump—it was from feeding me that she grew slender. My father’s claim sounded plausible to me, for in those penniless days the poorly nourished Li Yuezhen breast-fed two young children.

I had always been just as familiar with their family as I was with my own. Much of my time as a young child was spent in their home, for I would eat dinner and sleep there when my father worked the night shift. Li Yuezhen treated me and Hao Xia as though we were siblings, and on the rare occasions when we had a meat dish for dinner she would slip the last morsel of pork or chicken in my bowl and not in Hao Xia’s. Once Hao Xia burst into tears, saying, “Mom, I’m the one who’s your child!”

“It’ll be your turn next time,” Li Yuezhen said.

Hao Xia and I had been childhood sweethearts and had privately vowed to marry when we were grown up, so we could always be together. “You can be Dad and I’ll be Mom,” was how Hao Xia put it. At that point we thought of marriage as a combination of a dad and a mom, but once we understood that marriage is defined more precisely as a partnership of husband and wife, neither of us ever again mentioned our secret agreement and we both forgot it with equal speed.

I never again visited my family in the north, but simply called them on the phone on major holidays. Usually it was my birth mother who picked up, and after quizzing me about my affairs she would always urge me to look after Yang Jinbiao properly, saying with feeling, “He’s such a good man.”

My father fell ill the year after he retired. He lost his appetite and rapidly lost weight; the whole day through he felt drained of energy. He kept me in the dark, unwilling to let on that he was battling an illness; he thought he would slowly recover. When he got ill in the past he wouldn’t go to see the doctor and refused to take medication, instead depending on his strong constitution to see him through, and this time too he was confident he could fight it off. I was busy at work in those days and didn’t notice that my father was losing weight, until one day when I found he was just skin and bones and learned that he had been ill for half a year. I insisted that he go to the hospital for tests, and when the results came out, my hands trembled as they held the report, for my father had developed lymphoma.

I watched helplessly as the malignant cells gradually consumed my father’s life. Radiation treatment, surgery, chemothera
py—all these tormented my once-strong father so that when he walked it was with a crooked gait and it looked as though a gust of wind would be enough to blow him over. As a retired railroad worker he could claim reimbursement for a portion of his medical expenses, but these expenses were so enormous that we had to bear the bulk of them, and I quietly sold off his railroad dorm unit. So as to look after him, I gave up my job and bought a small shop near the hospital. My father slept in the back room, while in the front room I sold daily necessities to customers going by, so as to bring in a little income.

My father was upset, for I hadn’t consulted him before quitting my job and selling the property. He knew this was a fait accompli and would often sigh and moan, saying to me in distress, “You’ve got no house and no job—what will you do in the future?”

I tried to reassure him, saying that once he had recovered I would return to my original employer, start saving once more, and buy a new apartment for him to see out his days peacefully. He shook his head. “Where will you find the money to do that?” he said.

“If we can’t afford a full-cash purchase,” I told him, “we can always buy an apartment by taking out a mortgage.”

He shook his head all the more stubbornly. “Don’t buy an apartment. Don’t go into debt,” he cautioned.

I said nothing more, knowing his mind was made up. Before housing prices skyrocketed I had thought of taking out a mortgage, but my father was daunted by the prospect of owing the bank so much money and I had had to abandon the plan.

It was as though we had returned to the life in that rickety shack next to the railroad tracks. In the evening, after I had closed up shop, the two of us crammed onto the single bed to sleep. Every night, I could hear my father’s sighs and groans—the sighs on account of my grim future, the groans in reaction to his own pain. When his suffering was not so acute, we would share memories of earlier days, and at such moments his voice would take on a blissful tone. He would mention little episodes from my childhood, recalling how I would insist he lie next to me and watch me as I fell asleep, how sometimes when he adjusted his position and turned his back to me, I would call again and again, “Dad, look at me, look at me….”

I told my father that I remembered hearing him snoring when I woke up in the middle of the night when I was small. A few times I didn’t hear his snore and was so scared that I started crying, worried that perhaps he had died. I would shake him and shake him, and when he sat up, my tears would turn to smiles and I would say to him, “So you’re not dead after all!”

One evening my father neither sighed nor groaned. Instead he talked quietly about some key moments in our lives, such as how he had heard me crying on the railroad track and carried me in his arms to Li Yuezhen’s house. It was that evening too that I learned how, when I was four years old, he had abandoned me in order to get married. When he got to this point tears trickled from his eyes and he was stricken with self-reproach, saying over and over again, “How could I have been so heartless?”

I pointed out that I had left him too, joining that family up north, so the score was even. In the darkness he patted my hand, saying that for me to go to the home of my birth parents didn’t count as abandoning him.

He gave a little laugh. He recalled how clever I’d been to cover myself with leaves to keep myself warm that time he left me by that dark rock. This comment somehow refreshed my memory, and suddenly I remembered the stones, trees, and grasses, and the barking dog that had made me so fearful. I said it wasn’t that I was cold, but that I was afraid, for a dog kept barking constantly.

“No wonder,” he said, “that you had leaves over your head as well.”

I chuckled, and so did he. “I’m not afraid of dying,” he said to me evenly. “I’m not afraid of that at all. What I’m afraid of is not being able to see you.”

The next day he left without saying goodbye. He said nothing at all, not leaving even a note, dragging away the little life left in him. In the days that followed I kept kicking myself for being so inattentive. Shortly before this, my father had me take out a new railroad uniform from the wardrobe and put it next to his pillow. I hadn’t given this a second thought, assuming he just wanted to admire the last new uniform he had been issued prior to his retirement. But I overlooked his longstanding custom—that he liked to put on a new uniform when faced with some important task.