Oh, the fledgling had vanished without a trace. The gigantic bird squatted motionless on the old mulberry tree. Was the fledgling its child? Had it hidden it somewhere? Or was the fledgling unrelated? Mrs. Yun couldn’t keep from walking over to it again. The woman and the bird gazed at each other. Mrs. Yun started feeling feverish: she and the owl had begun communicating in a bizarre way. The gigantic bird’s faint green eyes brought a certain reality and calmness to Mrs. Yun’s empty, desolate heart. Mrs. Yun was no longer afraid of it. She even rushed to say to it: Wa, wa! The bird still didn’t move. Mrs. Yun thought it had discerned her deepest, innermost ideas. Actually, she herself didn’t know exactly what those ideas were.
When she went back to the courtyard, she sighed, “Today is really a long day.”
Wumei and Mr. Yun came back together. Mrs. Yun mentioned what had happened to the courtyard wall. Mr. Yun listened attentively as he ate. At last, he said lightly, “I noticed a long time ago that something was wrong with that wall. It warbles all the time.”
“The wall can make sounds? Why haven’t I heard it?” Mrs. Yun was puzzled.
“Because you haven’t tried. When I make sandals at night, the sound is awful.”
In high spirits, Wumei talked of her new discoveries. She said those women had returned, this time bringing four blind people along. The blind people were all experts at paper-cutting.
“Those designs. my God! No, I can’t explain it. What are the designs?! As soon as I saw them, I couldn’t say a word. For example, there are some feathers, but they aren’t feathers. No, they definitely aren’t feathers! They must be—”
Her eyes turned vacant. She was silent. When Wumei was like this, Mrs. Yun worried, but as usual Mr. Yun paid no attention. He always approved of Wumei.
Wumei washed the bowls. Mrs. Yun noticed that she was working like a puppet. She dipped her hands into the water for a long time without washing even one bowl.
The bird began calling. When she heard it, Mrs. Yun wept. She couldn’t bear it. In her mind, she kept visualizing the fledgling which had stared at her with blind eyes and whose beak had opened so wide. Mrs. Yun covered her face with her apron; she could still see it clearly.
“Mama! Mama!” Wumei shouted, horrified.
Mrs. Yun squatted down. Wumei closed the windows and doors tightly; only then did the bird’s whining weaken.
“Mama — oh, I love you!”
“I love you, too, sweetheart.” Mrs. Yun stood up with difficulty. She was dripping with cold sweat.
“Mama, I was the one who caused the wall to collapse. I wanted to see what was inside it. I shouldn’t have — I was too impulsive!”
“Where were you when the wall collapsed?”
“I ran off and later went to the market.”
“I want to find that little bird.”
“Its mother ate it.”
“Ah, so you saw it all.”
“I was hiding in the ditch. It was really shocking: the mother bird swallowed her baby bit by bit. Half-way through, she choked. I thought the mother bird would choke to death.”
As Mr. Yun’s footsteps sounded outside, mother and daughter both regained their composure. Wumei looked at her father, and acting as if nothing had happened, she went back to her bedroom.
“This might start happening frequently,” Mr. Yun said.
“What?”
“I’m speaking of Wumei. She’s getting gutsier.”
Mrs. Yun didn’t respond. She wanted to change her clothes because she was unbearably cold. When she left the kitchen, the bird’s whining had stopped. As she changed clothes in the bedroom, she saw someone standing outside the window. It was Youlin. Saying “damn guy,” she shut the window with a bang.
Mrs. Yun awakened in the middle of the night from a deep sleep. She heard the wind repeatedly slamming against the window, its howling incessant. She sat up and so did Mr. Yun.
Side by side, the two of them stood at the window and looked out.
In the moonlight, the willow trees planted in the courtyard the year before were being blown from side to side, all of them taking on an unearthly lavender color. Fluttering in the air were some weeds from who-knows-where. All of them were burning. “Will there be a fire? Will there be a fire?” Mrs. Yun asked in a quivering voice. She kept shaking her husband’s arm. Mr. Yun was also looking on in disbelief.
“Where did the fire start? Why didn’t we see any smoke?” he mumbled.
But he evidently didn’t really want to know where the fire started, for he staggered back to bed.
After giving it some thought, Mrs. Yun put on a jacket and went outside. When she opened the door, a gust of wind almost knocked her down. Burning weeds no longer floated in the air. Instead, the air from the wind held a transparent purity. The full moon was a little dazzling. Because it had never been so bright, its rays were tinged with purple. When Mrs. Yun was about to go back inside, she suddenly saw a woman with disheveled hair standing at the gap of the courtyard wall.
“Who are you??” Mrs. Yun shouted sternly. She was trembling all over.
“Wumei!” the woman wailed.
In her bedroom, Wumei — by fits and starts — told Mrs. Yun of the night’s events. She and the women she’d seen at the market had arranged to meet tonight to take a bus to a valley in the north where expert paper cutters gathered. They said there was a lot of good, tough glossy paper there, made from a plant that grows on the mountain. Because the plant was inexpensive, the paper was also cheap, and so all the villagers made papercuts. Outsiders exclaimed over their extraordinary designs. At the market, when they showed her one design, Wumei had been speechless with astonishment. She and the women headed toward the marsh. After walking a long time, they had intended to board a bus they’d seen stopped along the road. All of a sudden, a woman ran up from the marsh shouting something. Running up to them, she pointed at Wumei and said repeatedly that she was a “traitor.” At that point, the women began driving her away. They lifted her up, threw her to the ground, and kicked her head. They trampled her until she fainted. Then they went off on the bus.
“I’m fed up. Just leave me alone.” She waved at Mrs. Yun.
=
Mrs. Yun felt that her home was gloomy these days. Whenever Wumei had spare time, she shut herself up in her room and made papercuts. Mrs. Yun didn’t know exactly what she was cutting, because she no longer hung up her papercuts. As soon as she finished one, she hid it.
“Wumei, it’s been a long time since you’ve gone to the market to sell things,” Mrs. Yun said gingerly.
“I haven’t finished anything yet.”
Although Wumei appeared serene, Mrs. Yun knew this was a pose.
Mr. Yun said, “It’s good for a kid to experience some setbacks.”
When he spoke, Wumei’s face was expressionless.
Mr. Yun had already repaired the earthen wall; it looked as if it had never been damaged. The new wall wasn’t like a new one, either: fine grasses were still growing on it, so that it was exactly like the old wall. Mr. Yun did this work at night. In the morning, Mrs. Yun stood dazed next to the courtyard wall. She heard only magpies singing in the trees.
As Mrs. Yun stood there stunned, Mr. Yun came up and said:
“The water in the marsh has been low for quite some time. Now the sun has dried it up so it’s hard as rock. It’s said that a road will be built on it.”
“How can that be?”
“These years, anything is possible.”
Mr. Yun said he had left a hole under the wall for birds to stay in. He pointed it out to Mrs. Yun. The hole was cleverly designed: its entrance was behind a rock, so if you didn’t look carefully you wouldn’t find it. Mrs. Yun thought to herself, No wonder birds have been inside the wall. Mrs. Yun hadn’t noticed before that Mr. Yun had this skill. Maybe Wumei had inherited her skill from her father. When Mrs. Yun put her hand in the hole, she found it was so deep that you couldn’t touch the bottom.