I didn’t go on, because I realized now that when Hao Qiangsheng was buried his remains would not be interred with those of Li Yuezhen, but with those of one or more strangers.
Tears streamed from Li Yuezhen’s empty eyes, for this thought had occurred to her too. Tears flowed down her stonelike cheeks and fell onto the blades of grass below. Then her empty eyes lit up with a happier expression, and she raised her head to look at the warbling babies. “I used to have twenty-seven children. Now that you’re here, I’ve got twenty-eight.”
Her fingers, reduced simply to bones, began to stroke the black armband on my left arm. She knew that I was grieving for myself. “My poor boy,” she said.
In my ice-bound heart there appeared a warming glow. One of the infants, overreaching, tumbled down off a leaf and, sobbing pitifully, crawled over Li Yuezhen. She took the infant into her arms and gently rocked him back and forth, then set him back on top of another broad leaf, where he happily rejoined the warbling chorus.
“How did you get here?” Li Yuezhen asked.
I told her about my final moments, and also mentioned how Li Qing had come from so far away to say goodbye.
She gave a sigh. “Li Qing should never have left you.”
Perhaps she was right, I thought. If Li Qing had not left me at that point, we might still be living a peaceful life in that other world and our child would be in primary school — or maybe even middle school.
I recalled the disappearance of Li Yuezhen and the dead babies and how the funeral parlor had claimed that it had already cremated them all, though it was said that their ashes had actually been taken from the urns of other people altogether.
“I know about that,” she said. “People who came after me told me.”
I looked up at the babies singing away on the broad tree leaves. “Did you carry them all here?”
“No, I didn’t carry them,” she said. “I walked in front and they crawled along behind.”
Li Yuezhen said that late that night she did not hear the roar of the subsidence. She had been sleeping heavily, and at one stage she saw a vast chaos in which heaven and earth were inextricably mixed. A gleam of light appeared in the far distance, like a line on the horizon, and then light came rolling in like a tide. Heaven and earth separated, morning and night were uncoupled. Later, in her dreams she felt air whirling around rapidly and shuttling back and forth, and in the final stage of sleep she saw water spreading from the ground and rising inexorably until it was like an ocean.
Then she woke, to find she seemed to be falling vertically off a cliff. She slowly pushed aside the white cloth, the way she might sweep away snow in front of her door. Her feet began to move, taking her out of the morgue that now lay at the bottom of the sinkhole, bathed in a desolate moonlight. Her feet stepped on a broken wall as jagged as scattered dogs’ teeth, and she propelled herself out of the pit.
She walked into a city flooded with light, where pedestrians and cars jostled. Everything was the same as it had always been, but departure into another realm put her beyond the reach of this familiar world.
Out of habit she walked to the building where she used to live, as though returning home, but she could not enter it as she would have been able to before. No matter how she moved her legs, it was impossible to get closer. Three days after her departure from the human world, she saw a female figure appear briefly at a sixth-floor window and her heart skipped a beat, for it was Hao Xia — her daughter had returned.
In the two days and nights that followed, she never ceased in her efforts to approach the building, but she just seemed to move farther away. Hao Qiangsheng never appeared in that window and neither did I, and Hao Xia appeared just that once. She saw people moving tables and chairs and chests out of the building, then coffee tables and sofas and beds, until she knew that the furniture she had lived with for decades had been sold off and the apartment itself too, for her husband and daughter were about to fly to America.
Finally, one afternoon, she saw all three of us. Hao Qiangsheng, holding an urn in both hands, emerged from the building; he was supported by Hao Xia, who held in her right hand a large duffel bag, while I followed behind carrying a large suitcase in each hand. The three of us stood by the side of the road and a taxi pulled over. The driver and I together put the bag and suitcases into the trunk of the car. She saw me say a few words to Hao Qiangsheng, and he passed the urn to me. Holding it carefully in both hands, I sat down in the passenger seat, while Hao Xia and her father sat in the back. The taxi drove off.
She knew that this was a final parting, for her husband and daughter were leaving for far-off America. Tears came to her eyes and she dashed forward to deliver a greeting, but running simply put more distance between her and us. She came to a halt and watched as the the taxi disappeared in the flow of traffic.
She started sobbing then, and after much grieving she heard behind her a murmur, a murmur a bit like a sob, and when she turned around she saw the twenty-seven babies crawling along the ground in a line. At first they appeared to be just as upset as she was, but when her crying stopped, their susurrant sobs ceased too. She had not realized that they’d followed her out of the sinkhole and crawled all the way here. She gazed at the city that was gradually fading into the distance, then looked back at the twenty-seven babies, and realized what she had lost and what she had gained.
“Let’s go,” she said softly to the babies.
Li Yuezhen, dressed in white, walked forward slowly and the twenty-seven babies crawled after her all in a line. The sunlight was a grubby yellow as they threaded their way through the noisy city and entered a quiet space where they were greeted by silvery moonlight. They penetrated deeper and deeper into the silence.
After crossing the frontier between life and death, Li Yuezhen stepped onto a stretch of fragrant grass. The green grass rubbed the necks of the twenty-seven babies crawling along behind, and the ticklish sensation made them giggle. Where the grass ended, a gleaming river flowed. Li Yuezhen waded into the river, which slowly rose to the level of her chest, then slowly fell until it lay beneath her feet, as she arrived at the other bank. The babies paddled on the surface of the water, spluttering as they made the crossing, the sound of their little coughs carrying to her until they reached the bank. As they entered a forest, Li Yuezhen began to sing a song, and the babies behind sang along with her. She stopped, but they did not, and their nightingale-like refrain continued to waft among the trees.
“Your father was here,” Li Yuezhen said to me. “Yang Jinbiao was here.”
I looked at her in wonder.
“He had to travel a long road to get here, so he was very tired,” she said. “He lay down here for several days, thinking of you the whole time.”
“Where did he go after leaving me?”
“He got on the train and went to the place where he once abandoned you.”
That last evening’s conversation with my father had always been imprinted on my mind. We squeezed onto the narrow little bed in the room behind the shop, and the streetlights outside seemed ready to drift off to sleep as the night breeze caressed our window. It was the first time my father had wept in front of me. He told me how, for a young woman’s sake, he had abandoned me on a rock in an unfamiliar town. He described the rough texture of the rock face and the smoothness of its upper surface. It was on that terrace that he had put me, although subsequently he would reproach himself for his heartlessness, over and over again. When my father left me after that conversation more than a year ago, it never crossed my mind that this was where he would go.
My father had put on his brand-new railroad uniform, the newest set of clothes in his possession, which he’d never been able to bring himself to wear before. Dragging a weak and failing body, he boarded the train and squeezed his way to his seat. No sooner had he sat down than the train started to move. Watching the platform slowly recede into the distance, he suddenly became aware that he did not have much time left and did not know if he would ever be able to see me again.