Guhan caught Manager Ren the next day. This time Ren told him frankly that the mine didn’t have the cash to square the account, so they decided to pay the cannery with coal instead. “The best anthracite, at a twenty-percent discount,” Ren said, fanning his face with a large clipboard, as if both parties had already agreed to the settlement.
This was absolutely unacceptable to Guhan. The cannery didn’t need so much anthracite. Besides, how could they transport the coal to Muji? Railroad wagons, rationed by the state, were unavailable. Even if they managed to ship the coal back, there would be no place in the cannery to store the six hundred tons. So, Guhan resolutely refused the offer. Frustrated, he threatened that his factory would sue the mine.
Manager Ren replied helplessly, “What else can I say? Even if you beat me to death, I can’t come up with any cash. You can’t squeeze any fat out of a skeleton. We just had a terrible accident, you know that, and all our savings have gone to the medical bills.”
Go bankrupt! Guhan said mentally.
That night he wrote to his daughter, telling her to accept the admission to the agricultural school. By now he had become uncertain whether he’d be promoted to vice director, since it was unlikely he could fulfill his mission. He should at least let Liya get off the chicken farm; as for her return to the city, there might be some opportunity in the future.
It was sultry that evening. A few drops of rain fell; stars were unusually bright, piercing the thin mist in the sky. Despite the heat, Guhan went to bed early, having drunk three cups of sweet-potato liquor at dinner. His two roommates were with other tenants in the courtyard, where they were watching the well, which had somehow begun spouting water. A narrow ditch had been dug to drain the yellowish stream out into the street. Before Guhan went to sleep, some startled horses broke into neighing outside the inn and galloped away toward the railroad in the south. Many tenants went out to have a look, but Guhan was too tired to get up. Soon he fell asleep.
At about four o’clock the next morning, suddenly the room started trembling and jolting. A male voice yelled in the corridor, “Earthquake!” Guhan opened his eyes and saw the beds colliding — one of his roommates was flung up, crashed into the wall, and dropped on the cement floor. Instantly the man ceased making noise. Guhan jumped up and rushed toward the window, but the floor was shifting back and forth like a sieve; his legs were twisting as though shocked by electricity, and he was thrown down. He managed to sit up, then the room began swaying like a boat caught in a storm. Things crashed against one another while the roof was crackling. The ceiling fan fell to the floor, and thermos bottles, lamps, coat trees, chairs, and tables were flying about. Unable to get up, he tried crawling to the window. A jolt from below shot him upward and tossed him out of the room. With a crash he landed in a puddle, covered with bits of glass. Meanwhile, a chimney tumbled down the roof and crashed to the ground; a large brick hit his left wrist and smashed his Seagull watch. “Ow!” he yelled, holding his broken wrist, and rolled toward one of the apple trees, which all seemed to be capering about, their branches sweeping the ground right and left like brooms. It was bright everywhere as if in daylight; colorful flashes streaked across the sky, which turned now red, now pink, now blue, now silver, now saffron, now green. A long orange ribbon blazed in the air as though a set of power lines had caught fire. Around him were dust, explosions, screams, the rumble of collapsing houses and buildings. A roar, like that made by a thousand old oxen together, was rising from underground.
When he finally managed to get to his feet by holding the trunk of an apple tree with his right arm, all the houses around were leveled. Streets disappeared, covered by rubble. The landscape had widened in every direction, and here and there more trees emerged. From beneath the ruins came muffled groans and cries. Somewhere a man yelled, “Help! Ah, help me!”
A little girl, who had also been thrown out of a house, shrieked, “Mom! Save my mom!” Her small hand was clawing toward the debris.
Apples dropped about Guhan, whose arm was still around the trunk of the tree. In the east, jets of muddy water were shooting into the air, about twenty feet high, and fireballs broke out like bombs in places. A gust of wind tossed over an intense smell of methane, as though the air itself were burning and exploding.
Guhan, wearing only his underwear, remained motionless, as in a trance; his upper body was so thin that all his ribs were visible. He tried to shout, but no sound came out of his mouth. The aftershocks shook the ground continually, so he dared not let go of the tree.
Soon he collapsed, feeling as though he were engulfed by darkness, sinking deep into the sea.
Toward midafternoon some soldiers arrived. They wrapped Guhan in a blanket and dragged him away. After a medic bandaged up his wrist and let him drink some water from a canteen, a young officer asked Guhan, “Can you help us distribute canned food?”
“Oh, help!” he screamed.
“Can you join us in the rescue?”
“Help! Save me!”
“He’s out of his mind. Take him away,” the officer said.
A soldier led Guhan to a crowd of children and lightly injured adults. Twenty minutes later they were put into three Nanjing trucks, which were going to a suburban area where help was available. On the way, all the adults were speechless, though time and again someone broke into sobs. A few children kept crying for their parents who had disappeared.
The sight of the destruction overwhelmed everyone. All the houses and buildings in view had collapsed; there was only a concrete smokestack standing upright like a gigantic gun pointing to the sky. An apartment building had fallen and rolled all the way down a slope and broken to pieces at the bank of a brook. Another building was cut in half, in one of its rooms a white sheet and a line of colorful washing still flapping lazily. Here and there were cracks on the ground, some of which were too broad for the trucks to cross, so the soldiers filled them up with rocks and wooden poles. Now and then they came on a flooded crater caused by a caved-in mine tunnel. At the roadside near a cemetery, a tractor, together with its trailer, was almost buried by earth and pebbles, as though a mouth had opened from underneath to eat it but was unable to swallow the whole thing. Beyond the tractor, more than half of the gravestones had toppled over in the graveyard.
When the trucks passed a column of green ambulances that were heading for the city and were loaded with soldiers gripping shovels, picks, and broad banners, two helicopters emerged in the sky. One of them went on announcing, “All citizens must abide by the law and help one another. Any looter caught will be executed on the spot.” Beyond the helicopters a plane was banking away and dropping boxes of food and bundles of blankets to the citizens, who were working in groups to rescue the survivors trapped in the ruins.
“What’s your name?” an army doctor asked Guhan two days later in a field hospital.
“Apple,” he answered.
“Where are you from?”
“Apple.”
“Where is your work unit?”
“Orchard.”
“What orchard?”
“Apple.”
“How old are you?”
“Apple.”