Then Mother asked, "I wonder what's making the smoke?"
As the smell of something burning grew stronger, Mother and I had at almost the same moment become aware that smoke was filling the room.
We looked at the door and saw smoke funneling in through the cracks.
I said, "Mama, is somebody lighting a barbecue in the corridor?" As I spoke, I went over and opened the door.
Thick, dense smoke rolled in around my legs, and I saw that it had completely blotted out the dim light in the hallway. It was obviously eating away at the oxygen as well, for I started to choke and cough. Immediately I shut the door.
In the hallway you could hear, over the clatter and clamor of people fleeing, a chorus of confused voices.
"Hurry up, run…"
Mother and I exchanged a quick glance. There was a fire in our building.
"Mama, we've got to get out of here." Because I was so scared, my voice sounded different, as if it were coming from someone else's throat.
Mother put her hands on her breast as she struggled to breathe. "Where can we go? The elevator's shut down. There's nothing but smoke out there. It'll be impossible to breathe." Gasping for breath, she said, "If the fire's downstairs, wouldn't we just be jumping into it? Smoke and flames always go up, so there's no way the problem is above us. For sure it's somewhere below us," she gasped.
My mother is not a woman to panic in a crisis. In such situations she remains calm and collected.
"But listen" – I wasn't thinking clearly – "everybody's running downstairs."
Now the racket and confusion of fleeing feet and the sounds of household goods and suitcases being kicked and dragged along in the hallway was even worse, and there was the sound of things being smashed.
Because she couldn't breathe, Mother shot over to the window and opened it.
I shot over behind her saying, "Mama, you can't open the window." I remembered reading about that in the newspaper.
As I listened to the wind outside, all of a sudden I heard her coarse, rasping cry blot out the clamor in the building. "The only way out is to jump."
Ignoring my mother's plea, I closed the window and pulled her out the door.
We were immediately swallowed up in the thick, rolling smoke, which stung my eyes until the tears flowed. I clung to my mother's hand like death. We were right next to each other, but I couldn't see her. All around me through the turbid air, I could hear the sound of fleeing feet and people bumping heavily into things blocking their way. Unable to see them clearly, all we could do was grope our way downward with them.
There was very little air to breathe and the smoky hallways were filled with the sound of coughing and frightened shouts. I felt like a vise was clamped on my throat, choking me so that it was impossible to speak. Afraid that Mother might collapse from asphyxiation, I gripped her arm tightly as we fled.
I say "fled," but in actuality we could do no more than fumble our way along slowly.
I could feel that the heat and smoke were spreading upward from downstairs. The thick, endless smoke seemed to foil us with the tremendous buoyant force of sea water. The faster we tried to go down, the more our feet were buoyed back, making it difficult for us to press forward. But we had no choice but to force our way down – the only route to life lay below us. The feeling was exactly like many other absurd contradictions we encounter in life.
Mother's arm began to weigh heavier in my hand, and I was afraid she was going to collapse.
"Jump… jump…" she blurted out with difficulty.
I knew right away what she meant, because we had just groped our way to a landing in the stairwell, where the moonlight was shining in through the window closed tightly against the winter winds. Normally, the moon was like a round, silver eye glittering against the indigo curtain of night. But now it was like the faded eye of a dying man, casting only a thin thread of light in the narrow landing.
I knew what Mother was thinking: if there was no other way, we could jump from the stairwell window. Obviously she wasn't thinking clearly. We lived on the eleventh floor. We'd only come down a floor and a half, so we were between the ninth and tenth floors. Jumping would be suicide.
Paying no attention to what she said, I desperately tugged her along behind me. We groped our way down, one foot after the other. My slippers long since lost, I moved along slowly in my bare feet with only one thought in my mind – getting out of there.
What was odd was that at this particular moment, for no apparent reason, I recalled an incident from my past.
Again, it was when I was in middle school. There was a period of time when I could see no point in living – all I could think of was ending my life. I was not at all like most people contemplating suicide, who go around talking about how they "want to die." I kept it to myself until eventually I decided the time was ripe.
When I got home that day, I very seriously said to my mother, "I've thought about it a lot. Life is stupid. I don't want to live anymore."
Mother gave me a very surprised look. She looked at me for the longest time, but she didn't seem to be in a hurry to answer me.
So I said it again, much more emphatically. "I really have thought about it a lot. It's pointless to continue living."
There was a long silence, then finally Mother said, "Really? So you've made up your mind?"
I nodded my head decisively and said, "Yes!" as great big tears tumbled from my eyes.
My mother was very well read and not your ordinary woman at all. When I said these things, she didn't get alarmed or flustered and try to dissuade or urge me in any way, or stop me, as most mothers do with difficult children. She was wise enough to know how to handle a "problem child." Again, she considered this for a while; then, with a look of having thought it through and made a decision that was a counterpart to my own, she said, "Mama loves you very much. You know that. But if you've decided you want to die, then nobody can stop you. China 's such a big place, and we can't put a lid on the Yangtze River and the Yellow River. But Mama would miss you terribly."
It was my turn to be surprised. Mother's words completely stymied me. How right she was. There was no need to mention the Yangtze or the Yellow River, even the little canal outside our front door had no lid. Death was as easy as that. I didn't say a word.
I never mentioned it to Mother again.
By this time, with me hanging on to Mother and pulling for dear life, afraid that she would collapse at any moment, we had made our way down one more floor.
I quickly saw that the smoke was already thinner and the heat no longer so intense. The farther down we got, the easier it was to breathe.
All of a sudden it came to me: we had passed the floor where the fire was. As if we had just been rescued, I exclaimed to Mother joyfully, "We're safe, we're going to make it. We're almost out of it."
Naturally, when we went down another floor, the air gradually cleared, and the stairwell's feeble lights flickered and gleamed. At last Mother stopped and took several deep breaths. Then she spoke.
"The ninth floor," she said, "or maybe the eighth."
My guess was the same, it was probably the eighth or ninth floor.
Finally, we were out of the building, and standing there in the rushing wind on that late winter night, I saw that there was already a dark press of people gathered around. Some who had fled from their beds with no time to dress were standing there shivering, wrapped in their quilts. Whole families huddled together, their teeth chattering. Because we always went to bed very late, Mother and I both had sweaters on, but each gust of wind left us feeling like we were wrapped in nothing but a thin sheet of paper. Like countless icy worms, the cold penetrated deeper and deeper into our bones.
I started looking for Ho in the crowd. One after another the frightened, unsettled dark faces passed across my field of vision. This crowd of people that had fled from the thick smoke of death now stood numbly looking up at our building, trying to see where the fire was.