The Noodle Maker(59)
What will happen to me tomorrow? the professional writer wonders. Perhaps I’ll bump into those two on the street, and see the look of despair in the father’s eyes. The writer’s mind turns to the quiet waitress with long hair who works in the noodle shop where he goes to eat rice congee. He likes to gaze at her. She is brimming with life, but has a reserved and peaceful demeanour. He wonders how he can manage to work her into his novel too.
The Carefree Hound or The Witness
His bark often woke me from my sleep. It sounded different from the bark he used during our conversations: it was the bark of a dog. In the two months following his death, his bark continued to wake me. I’ll never recover from the fact that I was not with him when he died.
(The professional writer strokes his cigarette lighter and remembers the day he had lunch with the painter in the cafeteria of the municipal museum. The painter stared at him and asked, ‘Do you think my dog will be reincarnated again? How come he could talk like you and me? I’ve never told anyone the truth about him before, not even my girlfriend. I’ll tell you now, but you may not believe it.’)
I never saw what he looked like when he was dead. When I returned from my conference trip, he was already being transformed into a museum exhibit. Secretary Wang, the director of the museum, never told me the story behind his death, he just sent an officer up to my room to criticise me for secretly rearing a dog. The children downstairs told me they’d seen the dog being beaten to death by the old carpenter who lives on the fourth floor. They even led me to the alleged scene of the crime. They pointed to a dirty patch on the concrete floor and claimed it was the dog’s blood. I examined the patch carefully, and discovered that it was in fact a paint stain left behind by the decorators a few years ago. So I didn’t tackle the old carpenter about the subject. One day, Secretary Wang saw a picture I’d taken of the dog and said, ‘Well, if you didn’t want this to happen, you shouldn’t have let your dog piss in the lift.’ I came straight out with it, and asked him whether the old carpenter had been responsible for my dog’s death. Secretary Wang glanced at the door and said, ‘Did that security officer pay you a visit in the end? He was furious to hear that you were keeping a dog.’
When I asked him again how the dog had died, Secretary Wang seemed to change into a moth. His eyes became smaller and smaller, then he turned his back on me and flitted away through the open door. I could tell that his arse was no cleaner than any of the others I see in the public latrines. When I returned from my conference trip, the kennel was empty and there was no smell of urine on the terrace. The piece of cloth I had cut from the blanket on my bed was still lying in his basket, but it was infested with ants now. When I peered down, the ants looked up at me, then continued to race though the forest of woollen threads, as fast as the people in the streets below.
I crawled out of the kennel and started searching the roof terrace for any signs of the dog’s presence. The terrace is huge. There are so many chimneys sticking up from it, it looks like a forest of dead trees, or a field of gravestones. Some of the chimneys are over fifty years old and built in the shape of a cross. My room is in the tall clock tower on the edge of the terrace. It has a small window that looks out onto the streets below. Before my girlfriend committed suicide, she often came to visit me. She complained that the terrace was like a graveyard, and the clock tower like the house of the cemetery guard. She hated all the pipes that cut across the roof, she was always tripping over them. But my dog leaped happily across the terrace for more than two years without complaining once, and he only had three legs.
The clock doesn’t strike the hour any longer. During the Cultural Revolution, a Maoist cell called ‘Army of Millions’ took control of the tower and removed some parts of the clock to make weapons for use in their battles against the rival Maoist cell, ‘The Expulsion of Enemy Factions Brigade’. In the past, policemen all over town used to time their shifts by the clock. You can see its face from any road in the city. Likewise, I can see the entire town from my terrace, including the new urban district by the sea. When I get up in the morning and step out onto the terrace, I can see my former classmates and other people I know squeezing onto buses or eating breakfast at street stalls. Some who’ve made it into the office already and are trapped in a political meeting, wink up at me through their windows. When they finish work, I shout out to them, and they all shout back to me. It’s easier than using a telephone.
My dog was born up there.