He paused for a moment. “You know why we have eyebrows?”
“Why?”
“To block sweat.”
I heard him chuckle as he smiled to himself.
He pointed at the back of his head, then at the round hole in his forehead. “The bullet came in the back, and this is where it came out.”
He looked down at his black armband. “When I got here, I noticed that some people were wearing armbands for themselves, and I wanted to do the same. I felt nobody back there would wear an armband for me — certainly nobody in my family. I saw someone with a long, loose black jacket. I asked him if he would mind tearing off a piece of sleeve for me. He understood what I had in mind, and complied. With a black armband I feel at ease.
“Someone who came over later filled me in on what happened subsequently. Six months after I was shot, my wife suddenly returned home. Her clothes were ragged and torn, and her face was so filthy nobody could recognize her. She stood outside the front door cackling happily away, and eventually someone put two and two together.
“Everyone finally realized that I had been wrongly convicted. My parents and my brother and sister-in-law all wept for two days straight, so upset were they. The government gave them compensation to the tune of five hundred thousand yuan, and they bought a fine grave for me—”
“You have a burial site?” I asked. “Why are you still here?”
“At first, when I heard the news, I took off my armband and tossed it under a tree, preparing to head there straightaway. But before I’d gone ten yards, I felt I couldn’t bear to leave here, so I went back and put the armband on again. Now I don’t feel like going.”
“You don’t want to go to the place of rest?”
“No, I do,” he said. “My thought at the time was that I have a burial spot all lined up, so there’s no big hurry — I can go there whenever I feel like it.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Eight years now.”
“Is the burial plot still there?”
“Yes, it always has been.”
“When do you plan to go?”
“Sometime in the future.”
We walked to the gathering place of the self-mourners. Before my eyes there stretched a broad river — the gleaming scene had also broadened. A green bonfire was blazing vigorously on the riverbank, and the leaping sparks looked like dancing glowworms.
Already there were many skeletons wearing armbands sitting around the bonfire. I followed my companion into the throng, looking for a spot to sit. Some of those seated adjusted their positions, opening up several vacant spots. I stood there in a quandary, until I saw my new friend sitting down in a nearby spot; I sat down next to him. When I raised my head, I saw others approaching, some along the grassy hills, some along the riverbank; they were blending together the way quiet little streams spill into a wider flow.
The skeleton next to me gave a friendly greeting. “Hi there!”
“Hi there!” seemed to form a little soundwave, veering off, making a circuit around the bonfire, then returning to me before it subsided completely.
“Are they greeting me?” I whispered.
“That’s right,” he said. “You’re a new arrival.”
I felt that I was a tree transplanted back to its native forest, a drop of water returning to the river, a mote of dust returning to the earth.
One by one the armband-wearing self-mourners sat down, and voices gradually reverted to quiescence. We sat around the bonfire, and in the spacious silence there quietly surged a thousand words and ten thousand comments — the sound of many humble lives presenting an account of themselves. Every one of the self-mourners had bitter memories, too painful to recall, of that departed world; every one was a lonely orphan there. Mourning ourselves, we gathered here, but when we sat in a circle around the green bonfire, we were no longer lonely and abandoned.
There was no talking, no movement, just silent, understanding smiles. We sat in the silence, not with any goal in mind, just for the sensation that we were united, instead of being isolated individuals.
In the quiet circle of sitters I heard the dancing of the fire, the tapping of the water, the swaying of the grass, the soughing of the trees, the rustling of the breeze, the floating of the clouds.
These sounds seemed to be pouring out their woes, as though they too had suffered many reverses, ordeals too painful to recall. Then I heard snatches of a song reaching me, a song like that of the nightingale. I would hear a little burst of song, and then a pause, and then another burst of song….
I heard a sound like a whisper in my ear. “So, you’re here.”
When I walked toward this unfamiliar voice, it was like raindrops dripping from the eaves onto a windowsill, clear and light. I could tell that it was a woman’s voice, one that after enduring hardship and heartache had been reduced to twilight’s dim glow, but still retained a distinct rhythm, like a knock on the door — one, two, three. “So, you’re here.”
I was a bit confused. Was this greeting really directed at me? But there was a faraway intimacy — the kind of intimacy you find in the depths of memory — that made me feel this greeting was for me. It was followed by a song like that of the nightingale, rippling toward me, and then that tender greeting reached my ears once more.
I walked toward the warbling song, toward the call of “So, you’re here.”
I entered a copse of trees, and it seemed to me that the nightingale-like song was gliding down from the trees in front of me. As I came closer, I noticed that the tree leaves were getting bigger and bigger, and then I saw a line of tiny skeletal babies settled in the cradles formed by the spreading, swaying leaves, and the babies were rocking back and forth and singing a song that tugged at the heartstrings. I stretched out my fingers and counted them one by one, until I reached twenty-seven. This number made my heart quiver, and my memory at once caught up with that lost world, and I thought of those twenty-seven dead babies labeled “medical refuse” that were washed up on the riverbank.
“So, you’re here.”
I saw a skeleton dressed in bright white clothing sitting in the tall grass between the trees. She stood up slowly, gave a sigh, and said to me, “Son, how did you come to be here so soon?”
I knew who she was. “Mom,” I called softly.
Li Yuezhen walked up to me. Her empty eyes gazed at me and her voice sounded uncertain. “You look to be in your fifties, but you’re only forty-one.”
“You still remember my age,” I said.
“You’re the same age as Hao Xia,” she said.
By this time Hao Xia and Hao Qiangsheng were in America, in that other world, while Li Yuezhen and I were here in this one. When they left, I saw them off at the airport; they were flying to Shanghai and then taking a connecting flight from there. I asked Hao Qiangsheng to let me carry the urn of ashes, so that I could accompany this spiritual mother of mine for a small portion of her final journey.
“I saw you carrying the urn to the airport.” Li Yuezhen shook her head. “But they weren’t my ashes, they were someone else’s.”
Those ashes, I realized, must now be resting under her name, somewhere in America. “Hao Xia told she has already found a resting place for you,” I started to say, “and her dad will join you there in the future.”