The Noodle Maker(69)

He curled his lips and, glancing at the street below, said, ‘See those children making fun of the blind man? Look at their ugly faces! If their teachers sent them out tomorrow to perform good deeds, they’d fight for the chance to grab the blind man’s hand and help him across the road.’

Although their faces were a blur, I could see them racing across the blind man’s path, performing karate moves they had picked up from some martial arts film. Then the dog asked: ‘If you had to choose between me and a child, which one would you save?’

I couldn’t answer. Even today I wouldn’t be able to give an answer to that question. Naturally, I should put a human life before a dog’s, but my feelings for the survivor far exceeded any I felt for those children in the street – they were even stronger than the feelings I had for my girlfriend. If those children were indeed responsible for the survivor’s death, I know he wouldn’t have put up a fight. He could have bitten off one of their legs had he wanted to, but he would have chosen to suffer in silence rather than cause them any harm.

When I returned from the conference, I made a thorough inspection of his body to try and find out the cause of his death. He reeked of formaldehyde, but there were no wounds on his skin. I patted him on the back and said, ‘Look, they didn’t hurt you at all! Why have you been lying to me in my dreams?’

A couple of weeks later, I returned to the workshop to speak to the carpenter. When I entered the room, he was nailing the skin of a Dongbei tiger onto a wooden frame. I asked him how the three-legged dog had died. He smiled amiably, and drawing the tiger’s pelt across the frame, he said: ‘A three-legged dog? I’ve seen a five-legged donkey and a five-legged bull. Ha ha! Those fifth legs were half the size of the others!’ He roared with laughter, and made a lewd gesture above his groin.

I am convinced that Secretary Wang knows exactly how the dog died. I even suspect that he planned the murder himself He is the museum’s Party secretary, after all. Maybe he wanted to use this episode to test my loyalty to the Party. How could he not have known that I was keeping a dog on the terrace? Perhaps at first he decided to sit back and wait for me to confess my crime. But when he saw me commit mistake after mistake, he packed me off to a conference and got rid of the dog while I was away. When I returned from the trip, he convened an enlarged session of the Party cell, and encouraged the members to come forward and give their opinions on my relationship with the dog.

‘The higher organs are putting me to the test,’ I told the stuffed survivor the next time I visited him in the workshop. ‘In the meeting before my trip, they asked if any comrades had something they wanted to reveal. I should have owned up about you there and then. You had the cheek to criticise my girlfriend for committing suicide, and then you go and die yourself!’

‘Did you love her?’ the stuffed survivor asked me suddenly. ‘Don’t you feel responsible for her death? Why was she so willing to throw her life away? How could you have let her go through with it? What was she trying to tell you?’

His questions left me speechless. I remembered the first time I met her, when I was chairman of the student union   at school. If I hadn’t got involved with her, I would probably have entered the Party that year. After I graduated from university, I was assigned a room in a staff dormitory block, and our friendship deepened. She would visit me every day and stay until ten at night, slipping out just before the security guard locked the front gates. In my darkened room, I would rest my head on her stomach and listen to the growling of her intestines. She lay down on my bed and gave herself to me. But even today, I don’t know what I loved about her. She was a woman, my girlfriend, but had she been any other woman, would I have felt any different? How would I have reacted if my leaders hadn’t agreed to our relationship? (She was still at drama school at the time and her lifestyle wasn’t faultless.) Just before she died, her eyes were full of kindness and goodwill. I wondered whether she was hoping I would rush to her rescue.

‘Then why didn’t you try?’ the survivor asked.

‘I did jump to my feet at one point. But I had skived off a political meeting at work that day, and if news had got out that I wasn’t ill at all, but had come to watch the performance, I would have got into terrible trouble. She knew very well that the higher organs were in the process of considering my application to join the Party.’

‘You should be held responsible for her death.’

‘No, my only responsibility is towards the Party,’ I said, refusing to give in to him.