After a few days, Brother came over and sat on the edge of the desk, dangling his skinny legs. When I mentioned the granite structure across the way, his face immediately clouded over.
“I always hear someone weeping there,” I said.
“Why don’t you walk over to the front of the wall and take a careful look?” Brother mumbled as he jumped down from the desk. With his back to the window, he blocked my line of sight. “Fantasy is still the way we do things best.”
Lowering his head, he walked out, seemingly quite irritated.
The granite façade glimmered in the murky twilight. Next to the wall, some people walking past were dimly visible. What on earth was going on over there? I hadn’t heard Brother weeping; I had just wanted to draw him out to talk about some things, and so I had lied to him. He must have grown angry because he saw through my ruse. Could my husband have told a lie? I made up my mind to go over to the wall the next day to take a close look.
=
It could be said that I had “turned a blind eye” to this building for years. The granite wall was very old with dark watermarks on it. This was a deserted building. I heard a key turn twice in the lock, and the door opened with a creak. I went inside without a second thought.
A person with his back to me was standing in the empty corridor. In the dim light, I couldn’t get a good look at his face. I thought he was crying.
“On the 18th of April, you saw the beginning and the end of the matter,” he said, his bare head gleaming and closing in on me. I still couldn’t see his face well. I waited for him to go on talking, but he didn’t: it was as if something had struck him. Bending over, he began to sob softly.
No one else was in the corridor, and the atmosphere was gloomy. He squatted against the wall and cried. As he sobbed, his aged back shuddered. Just then, from somewhere outside, I heard the sound of a car rolling by. At the end of the corridor, someone quite angrily bumped into the door with a peng.
“Probably you know my brother?” I bent down and shouted at the man.
“It’s too late. Too late!” he said, out of breath, through his tears.
As I stood there, both ashamed and afraid, countless emotions welled up in my heart. He began scrabbling at the crumbly limestone wall with his fingers, making a nerve-racking sound. The dust kept falling.
“Brother! Brother! Don’t leave me behind alone!” I blurted out in despair.
At this, the person stopped crying right away and stood up like a gravely wounded wild animal. He turned toward me. Now he and I were so close to one another that we couldn’t have been any closer. His sleeves touched my hand. The strange thing was that his face was still a dark shadow. No matter which angle I looked from, I couldn’t see his true face. It was as if the light couldn’t reach it.
He began backing away from me. For each of his steps backward, I took a step forward. Our entangled shadows were reflected on the wall; it looked as if we were fighting. I felt an unparalleled tension. All of a sudden, the doors on both sides of the corridor opened, and he turned around and fled. It seemed that people in all the rooms were craning their necks to watch. I didn’t dare stay here, so I turned, too, and ran out the front door.
I stopped at the end of the path. Looking back, I saw that the door was still standing wide open. Inside, the corridor was pitch-dark, and the lights in those few windows had all been turned off. The structure had once more become lifeless. I looked up at the sky: it was actually already daybreak.
People were coming around from the path over there, talking in low voices. I saw the lame girl and the young man again. Although it wasn’t raining, the young man was still holding a large, sky-blue umbrella aloft. When they passed me, the two of them were dumbfounded for a moment and stopped walking. Lowering my head, I rushed forward. I didn’t dare look at them. After walking quite far, in the end I couldn’t keep from looking back. They were still standing in the same place, and in the first rays of morning sun, the large blue umbrella glittered with light. The man was bending his head to say something to the girl. Behind them, the granite wall of the lifeless building was blurry and remote.
When I got home, my husband was already up. He was sitting there neatly dressed, as if he was intending to go out. He set my breakfast on the table.
“Time flew last night. I overslept,” he said.
It was strange: he had the same feeling. Was time different inside and outside the building? As I drank some milk, I peeped at his face. When they were dreaming, could people tell any difference in time? Since he had slept straight through, how did he know whether time had passed quickly or slowly?
“What’s the 18th of April?”
“It’s the anniversary of your older brother’s death. Have you forgotten even this?” He was a little surprised.
“At night, people can forget anything, no matter what it is.”
“True. I’ve felt this, too. In one short night, innumerable things can occur.”
I walked over to the desk, and my gaze settled on that wall. The room suddenly felt sultry. Like a small fish, a faint desire swam back and forth. My husband went out, heading in the opposite direction from that building. He kept hesitating, as if he were thinking of backtracking to take a look and then giving up the idea. Turning a corner, he disappeared. The leaves on the date tree at the doorway were moist. Had someone sprayed it with insecticide, or had it rained hard again during the night? Brother had told me last time that he would leave here soon. This was the first time in his life that he was going far away. I asked where he was going. He replied laconically, “I’ll just keep going.” When he said this, I recalled my husband’s description of him a couple of days ago. When a person disappears like a ray of light into the wall, what does time mean to him? Our parents’ faces were alight with joy, their dispositions softening at once. Because of their tardy expression of love for my brother, they both felt a little confused and said they regretted being unable to accompany their son on his journey. If they had been ten years younger, they could have.
When he left, he kept looking back, his face darkening, his appearance dejected. When he was about to get into the car, Mother hung on to the strap of his backpack and wouldn’t let go. When the car started up, Father followed, jumping along like a locust, thus giving rise to jokes from passersby. As soon as the car disappeared around a corner, the two old people sat down on the ground, looking demented. My husband and I had to exert ourselves to get them back into the house. They sat side by side on the couch, and Mother suddenly asked quietly: “How can someone who has everything going for him be carried away by a car?”
My husband tried his best to explain. He said my brother hadn’t disappeared from this world: he was merely taking a trip. This was common enough in other families. He would enjoy himself for a while in the outside world and come back again before long.
Sneering at his explanation, Mother said, “Have the two of you reached an agreement with him? Your father and I are old. We passed our prime a long time ago. But even though we’re old, we’re still alert. We’ve also heard about what happened in front of your house: it’s exactly what we predicted. When you chose to move down here, we talked about it.”
Then she took Father’s hand and looked at it carefully. After a while, the two of them dozed off.
=
I started seriously considering making an inspection behind the building. We hadn’t gone there since we moved here more than ten years ago, because there was a craggy hill behind the granite wall. My husband and I always thought there was nothing worth looking at. Before falling asleep, I mentioned my plan to my husband. He said vaguely, “What if you get lost?”