When I couldn't find Ho, I started to get anxious, realizing that the fire might well have started on her floor. When I thought of her lying on her bed in those plain green pajamas, my mind erupted suddenly into flame.
Then, the wavering bleat of their sirens adding new confusion to the scene, the fire engines raced up. The crowd, the trees, and the building were now all bathed in a brilliant orange glow. The sky flashed with the uncommon blue of diamonds, like the eyes of so many corpses floating in the darkness of heaven, their cold lips caressing the earth.
We were immediately ordered to move back 200 meters to an empty place on the side of the street away from our building. I was in the middle of a group of men who wanted to go back into the building to look for family members, or particular things that they had left behind. They struggled to get to the building, but they were kept firmly back. We were so crowded together that we couldn't move.
I looked up, praying fervently, Let her be safe, let her be safe, all the while shaking uncontrollably.
By this time, two firemen were climbing up the wall with the aid of ropes to rescue whoever might be in the apartment where the fire had started. I focused all my attention on them. I watched those two small, flamelike, greenish shapes dart up the wall like a pair of salamanders. In no time at all, they were at the ninth floor. At last, at the place I was most afraid they might stop – Ho's balcony – half suspended in space, using metal hooks to secure themselves, they flipped over the railing into her apartment.
My heart contracted violently, as if I had suffered a blow from some sharp weapon, and the blood in my veins congealed into silence.
There was no denying it. The fire was in Ho's apartment.
I stood there transfixed, until an uncontrollable wailing burst from me.
Just as the valves on the fire hoses were opened, I gave way to a flood of tears.
Eventually, they got the fire under control. Water from the upper floors poured down the stairwell and flooded out of the main entrance. Then two firemen bearing a stretcher emerged.
That naked pink corpse, or better to say that vaguely human-shaped lump of flesh, moved slowly toward us.
The crowd stirred.
A fireman shouted, "Is there anyone here from apartment 905?"
Ho's apartment.
My head and feet felt distorted, my eyes burned, my hands were like ice. I kept trying to bring myself back to my senses. I was hallucinating. None of this was real. But Mother was with me, holding me, her hands gripped tight around my shoulders.
All of it, everything before me, was real. I knew it.
When the stretcher moved across the street toward us, a great roaring filled my head and then began to die away, as the people around me, the street lamps, and our building began to sway.
Things started to blur; the noise around me faded. Then the world went black as I collapsed on the street.
The roar of the demented wind screaming Ho's name blotted out the clamor of that scene. The crowd of people had fled the roar; only Ho was there, floating in a dazzling circle of light…
Much later, long after that disastrous fire, I heard a silly but upsetting rumor that it was caused by Ho's faulty refrigerator…
18 A Stray Bullet…
Even until today, we still use silence to avoid our past.
These have been days that I do not wish to remember. Everything has been changing too quickly. With every day, I become more substantial; with every day, this world is less so.
I am at a doorway. If I pass through, perhaps I can be young again – yet I know I can never be young again…
How that stray bullet came to find me, penetrating my left calf and exiting without my feeling it at all, remains an unsolved riddle.
It was late one evening in early summer. I was on my way to see my mother, who had been confined to the hospital because of a partial malfunction of the left chamber of her heart.
It was strange that this shady, cool street directly behind Tian'anmen Square, which for many days had been part of a boiling ferment of debate, was now suddenly deserted and quiet. I was rather puzzled. How could that tangle of traffic and press of crowds simply vanish into thin air?
My senses sharpened. I could hear in the distance a strange, clanking sound, the rumble of wheels, and what sounded like exploding fire-rackers. At the corner two or three hundred meters in front of me, lying there like the carcass of a huge dead horse, was what appeared to be an overturned object blocking the road. All around it, I thought I could make out the wavering shapes of people, but I couldn't be sure. Farther away, a corner of the descending night sky suddenly darkened as if it were preoccupied with plotting some secret.
Then I heard an angry sound like the snort of a wild boar hang briefly in the evening air at the same moment that I felt something hard strike the calf of my left leg. It felt hot, numb. I struggled to keep standing. It seemed as if suddenly my leg had been wrenched away from me, was no longer mine. Feeling no pain at all, I looked down curiously. A thick red liquid was running down the left leg of my trousers onto the street.
Jerking up, I looked all around me. The dying echoes of that angry sound were followed by a dead silence. As the blue of twilight gradually thickened, the dying light clung like a tight mesh around my body. I stood there frightened and afraid to move. I couldn't see anything unusual, nor had any idea what had struck my leg.
As I looked around in fear, I kept thinking that these were unusual times, everything was distorted, changed. Evil intentions lurked everywhere and anything could cause them to erupt.
The muffled clanking sound in the distance became clearer and clearer, turning into a rumbling thunder. As I strained to listen, I heard once more that angry sound, like the snort of a wild boar, this time protracted and unbroken.
I turned fearfully in its direction.
What transpired was a miracle. Beyond the street corner in the distance, a wavering mirage suddenly appeared and began to rumble slowly toward me, cutting through everything within my field of vision…
I was dumbstruck.
Dropping to my knees, I scrambled to the side of the road, and grabbing hold of a spindly tree, hid there like a thief, holding my breath, pressed behind a huge block of stone. Only then did the pain in my leg start rising upward, to engulf me. The wound was like a dark red cave, the mouth of a living spring. Around the opening, the flesh, like the split cardboard casing of an exploded firecracker, was curling outward…
Only after being taken by the people on the street to the nearby hospital where my mother was, not as a visitor but as a patient, did I finally find out that the hard object that had struck my leg was a wayward bullet. It had passed between the two bones in my calf and out the other side before it even registered that something had hit me.
When Mother, all upset, came to the emergency room to see me, the whole thing struck me as totally absurd.
The turmoil in Tian'anmen Square that summer, which was causing a sensation around the world, had become fanatical and violent, stirring the hungry winds of discontent into a fierce storm that left the city shedding silent tears. The fledgling trees and the grass along the roadway may be beaten and bent by the blazing sun or the slashing rain, but before too long they begin to sway, then slowly straighten up again.
We had been keeping to the house for a number of days, but could still hear an unbroken chorus of fierce and rabid shouting coming from the streets. There was a forest of green uniforms rooted like trees in every street and alleyway. Like the leaden gray sky overhead, these stiff uniforms had been around from ancient times. Present in every age, every region, they penetrate all time and space. Perhaps this is the nature of things. Every time it rains, every time the wind blows, the slight est movement is passed from one point to another until it is everywhere and every tree, every blade of grass becomes a soldier.