Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather (4 page)

“Nothing’s ever happened.”

“If something had, it’d be too late and I wouldn’t be able to bear it.”

“Stop it! People are looking at us…”

The lovers look at one another and, holding each other’s hands even more tightly, walk off.

They finish taking photographs of the scene of the accident, and the policeman with the tape measure takes a shovelful of dirt and spreads it over the blood. The wind has died down completely and it is getting dark. The conductress sitting by the window of the trolley bus has put on the lights and is counting the takings from the tickets. A policeman carries the wreckage of the bicycle on his shoulder to the car. Two men with red armbands get the buggy from the gutter, put it into the car, and leave with the policemen.

It is time for dinner. The conductress is left standing at the door of the trolley bus and looks around impatiently while waiting for the depot to send a driver. Passersby only occasionally glance at the empty bus stopped for some reason in the middle of the road. It is dark and no one notices the blood covered with dirt in front of the bus that can no longer be seen.

Afterward, the streetlights come on and at some time the empty bus has driven off. Cars speed endlessly on the road again and it is as if nothing has happened. By around midnight hardly anyone is about. A street-washing truck slowly approaches from the intersection some way off where traffic lights flash from time to time next to an iron railing with a blue poster. There is a row of words in white:
FOR YOUR OWN SAFETY AND THAT OF OTHERS
,
PLEASE OBSERVE TRAFFIC RULES
. At the spot where the accident had occurred, the truck slows down and, turning on its high-speed sprinkler jets, flushes clean any remaining traces of blood.

The road cleaners don’t necessarily know that a few hours ago an accident had occurred and that the unfortunate victim had died right here. But who is the deceased? In this city of several million, only the man’s family and some close friends would know him. And if the dead man wasn’t carrying identification papers, right now they might not even know about the accident. The man probably was the child’s father, and when the child calms down, it will probably be able to say the father’s name. In that case, the man must have a wife. He was doing what the child’s mother should have been doing, so he was a good father and a good husband. As he loved his child, presumably he also loved his wife, but did his wife love him? If she loved him, why wasn’t she able to carry out her duties as his wife? Maybe he had a miserable life, otherwise why was he
so distracted? Could it have been a personal failing and he was always indecisive? Maybe something was troubling him, something he couldn’t resolve, and he was destined not to escape this even greater misfortune. However, he wouldn’t have encountered this disaster if he had set out a little later or a little earlier. Or, if after picking up the child he had pedaled faster or slower, or if the woman at the kindergarten had spoken longer to him about his child, or if on the way a friend had stopped him to talk. It was unavoidable. He didn’t have some terminal illness but was just waiting to die. Death is inescapable for everyone, but premature death can be avoided. So if he hadn’t died in the accident, how would he have died? Traffic accidents in this city are inevitable, there are no cities free of traffic accidents. In every city there is inevitably this probability, even if the daily average is one in a million; and in a big city of this size there will always be someone encountering this sort of misfortune. He was one such unfortunate person. Didn’t he have a premonition before it happened? When he finally encountered this misfortune what did he think? Probably he didn’t have time to think, didn’t have time to comprehend the great misfortune that was about to befall him. For him, there could be no greater misfortune than this. Even if he was that one in a million, like a grain of sand, before dying he had clearly thought of the child. Supposing it was his child, wasn’t it noble of him to sacrifice himself? Maybe it was not purely noble but to a
certain extent instinctual, the instinct of being a father. People only talk about a mother’s instinct, but there are some mothers who abandon their babies. To have sacrificed himself for the child was indeed noble, but this sacrifice was entirely avoidable: if he had set out a little later or earlier, if at the time he had not been preoccupied, and if he were more resolute by nature, or even if he were more agile in his movements. The sum total of all these factors had hastened his death, so this misfortune was inevitable. I have been discussing philosophy again, but life is not philosophy, even if philosophy can derive from knowledge of life. And there is no need to turn life’s traffic accidents into statistics, because that’s a job for the traffic department or the public security department. Of course a traffic accident can serve as an item for a newspaper. And it can serve as the raw material for literature when it is supplemented by the imagination and written up as a moving narrative: this would then be creation. However, what is related here is simply the process of this traffic accident itself, a traffic accident that occurred at five o’clock, in the central section of Desheng Avenue in front of the radio repair shop.

I walk past a new shop that sells fishing equipment. The different fishing rods on display make me think of my grandfather, and I want to buy him one. There’s a ten-piece fiberglass rod labeled “imported,” though it’s not clear if it’s the whole rod that’s imported or just the fiberglass, nor is it clear how being imported makes any of it better. All ten pieces overlap and probably retract into the last black tube, at the end of which is a handle like a pistol’s and a reel. It looks like an elongated revolver, like one of those Mausers that used to be in fashion. My grandfather certainly never saw a Mauser, and he never saw a fishing rod like this even in his dreams. His rods were bamboo, and he definitely wouldn’t have bought one. He’d find a length of bamboo and straighten it over a fire, cooking the sweat on his hands as he turned the bamboo brown with the smoke. It ended up looking like an old rod that had caught fish over many generations.

My grandfather also made nets. A small net had about ten thousand knots, and day and night he would tie them nonstop. He’d move his lips while he knotted, as if counting or praying. This was hard, much harder work for him than the knitting my mother did. I don’t recall his ever
having caught a decent-sized fish in a net; at most, they were an inch long and only worth feeding to the cat.

I remember being a child, things that happened when I was a child. I remember that if my grandfather heard someone was going to the provincial capital, he would be sure to ask the person to bring back fishing hooks for him, as if fish could only be caught with hooks bought in the big city. I also remember his mumbling that the rods sold in the city had reels. After casting the line, you could relax and have a smoke as you waited for the bell on the rod to tinkle. He wanted one of those so he’d have his hands free to roll his cigarettes. My grandfather didn’t smoke ready-rolled cigarettes. He ridiculed them as paper smokes and said they were more grass than tobacco, that they hardly tasted of tobacco. I would watch his gnarled fingers rub a dried tobacco leaf into shreds. Then all he had to do was tear off a piece of newspaper, roll the tobacco in it, and give it a lick. He called it rolling a cannon. That tobacco was really powerful, so powerful it made my grandfather cough, but that didn’t keep him from rolling it. The cigarettes people gave him as presents he would give to my grandmother.

I remember that I broke my grandfather’s favorite fishing rod when I fell. He was going fishing, and I had volunteered to carry the rod. I had it on my shoulder as I ran on ahead. I wasn’t careful, and when I fell, the rod caught in the window of a house. My grandfather almost wept as
he stroked the broken fishing rod. It was just like when my grandmother stroked her cracked bamboo mat. That mat of finely woven bamboo had been slept on for many years in our home and was a dark red color, like the fishing rod. Although she slept on it, she wouldn’t let me sleep on it, and said if I did, I’d get diarrhea. She said the mat could be folded, so in secret I folded it, but as soon as I did, it cracked. I didn’t dare tell her, of course, I only said I didn’t believe it could be folded. But she insisted that it was made of black bamboo and that black bamboo mats could be folded. I didn’t want to argue because she was getting old and I felt sorry for her. If she said it could be folded, then it could, but where I folded it, it cracked. Every summer the crack grew longer, and she kept waiting for a mat mender to come; she waited many years, but no mender came. I told her people didn’t do this sort of work anymore and that she’d had the mat so long, she might as well buy a new one, but my grandmother didn’t see it that way and always said the older, the better. It was like her: the older she got, the kinder she became and the more she had to say, by repeating herself. My grandfather wasn’t like that: the older he got, the less he had to say and the thinner he became, until he was like a shadow, coming and going without a sound. But at night he coughed, and once he started, he couldn’t stop, and I was afraid that one day he wouldn’t be able to catch his breath. Still, he kept on smoking until his face and fingernails were the color of his
tobacco, and he himself was like a dried tobacco leaf, thin and brittle, and it worried me that if he wasn’t careful and bumped into something, he might break into little pieces.

My grandfather didn’t just fish; he also loved to hunt. He once owned a well-greased shotgun made out of steel tubing. To make the shotgun was a lot to ask of anyone, and it took him half a year to find someone who would do it. I don’t recall his bringing home anything except for a rabbit. He came in and threw a huge brown rabbit onto the kitchen floor. Then he took off his shoes, asked my grandmother to fetch hot water so he could soak his feet, and immediately started rubbing some tobacco he’d taken from his pouch. Wild with excitement, I hovered around the dead rabbit with our watchdog, Blackie. Unexpectedly my mother came in and started yelling.
Why didn’t you get rid of that rabbit like I told you to? Why did you have to buy yourself that shotgun?
My grandfather muttered something, and my mother started yelling again.
If you must eat rabbit, ask the butcher to skin it before you bring it into the house!
My grandfather seemed very old then. After my mother left, he said German steel was good, as if with a shotgun made of German steel he could shoot something more than rabbits.

In the hills not far from the city, he told me, there used to be wolves, especially when the grass started to grow in the spring. Crazed with hunger after starving all winter, the wolves came into the villages and stole piglets, attacked
cows, and even ate young cowherd girls. Once they ate a girl and left only her pigtails. If only he’d had a German shotgun then. But he wasn’t able to keep even the shotgun he’d had made locally from steel tubing. In the book-burning era of the Cultural Revolution they called it a lethal weapon and confiscated it. He sat on a little wooden stool just staring ahead without saying a word. Whenever I thought about this, I felt sorry for the old man and dearly wanted to buy him a genuine German-made shotgun. I didn’t, but I once saw a double-barreled shotgun in a sporting goods store. They told me I would need a letter of introduction from the highest-level sports committee in the province as well as a certificate from the public security office before they could sell it. So it was clear that I would be able to buy my grandfather only a fishing rod. Of course I also know that even with this imported ten-piece fiberglass fishing rod he won’t catch anything, because our old home turned into a sandy hollow many years ago.

There used to be a lake not far from our home on Nanhu Road. When I attended primary school, I often passed the lake, but by the time I started junior secondary school, it had turned into a foul pond that produced only mosquitoes. Later, there was a health campaign and the pond was filled in. Our village also had a river. As I recall, it was in an area far from town, and when I was a child, I went there only a couple of times. Once when my grandfather came to visit, he told me that the river had dried up
when a dam was built upriver. Even so, I want to buy him a fishing rod. It’s hard to explain, and I’m not going to try. It’s simply something that I want to do. For me the fishing rod is my grandfather and my grandfather is the fishing rod.

I step into the street shouldering a fishing rod with all its black fiberglass pieces fully extended. I can feel everyone looking at me and I don’t like it. I’d like to get on a bus, where I won’t be noticed as much, but I can’t get the rod to retract. I hate it when people stare at me. Shy since childhood, I am uncomfortable in new clothes, and being dressed up is like standing in a display window; but it’s worse carrying this long, swaying, shiny fishing rod. If I walk fast the rod sways more, so I go slow, parading down the street with the rod on my shoulder, feeling as if I’ve split my trousers or I can’t zip up my fly.

Of course I know that people in the city who go fishing are not after fish. The men who buy tickets to fish in the parks are out for leisure and freedom. It’s an excuse to escape from home, to get away from the wife and children, and to get a little peace. Fishing is now regarded as a sport, and there are competitions with divisions according to the type of rod used; the evening newspapers rate the sport highly and carry the results. Fishing spots and party venues are designated, but there are no signs of any fish. No wonder skeptics say that the night before the competitions, people from the fishing committee come to put fish into
nets, and that’s what the sportsmen catch. As I am carrying a brand-new rod on my shoulder, people must think I’m one of those fishing enthusiasts. But I know what it will mean to my old grandfather. I can already see him. So hunched over that he can’t straighten his back, he is carrying his little bucket of worms. It is riddled with rust and bits of dirt are falling out of it. I should visit my old home to get over my homesickness.

But first I must find a safe place to put the rod. If that young son of mine sees it, he’ll wreck it. I hear my wife shouting at me,
Why did you have to buy that? It’s cramped enough in here already. Where will you put the thing?
I put it above the toilet tank in the bathroom, the only place my son can’t reach, unless he climbs onto a stool. No matter what, I must go back to the village to get rid of this homesickness, which, once triggered, is impossible to shake. I hear a loud crash and think it’s my wife using the meat cleaver in the kitchen. You hear her yelling,
Go and have a look!
You then hear that son of mine crying in the bathroom and know that calamity has befallen the fishing rod. You’ve made up your mind. You’re taking the fishing rod back to your old home.

But the village has changed so much you can’t recognize it. The dirt roads are now asphalt, and there are prefab buildings, all new and exactly the same. On the streets women of all ages are wearing bras, and they wear flimsy shirts to show them off, just as each rooftop must have an
aerial to show there’s a television in the house. A house without an aerial stands out and is regarded as defective. And of course everyone watches the same programs. From 7:00 to 7:30 it’s the national news, from 7:30 to 8:00 the international, then short TV films, commercials, weather forecasts, sports, more commercials, then variety shows, and from 10:00 to 11:00 old movies. The movies aren’t aired every day: on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, it’s TV series instead. On the weekends, programs on cultural life are shown through the night. Anyway, the aerials are magnificent. It’s as if the rooftops had grown small forests but a cold wind came and blew off all the leaves so that only bare branches remain. You are lost in these barren forests and can’t find your old home.

I remember that every day on my way to school I had to pass a stone bridge, and the lake was right next to it. Even when there was no wind, there were waves lapping all the time, and I used to think they were the backs of swimming fish. I never imagined that the fish would all die, that the sparkling lake would turn into a foul pond, that the foul pond would then be filled in, and that I would not be able to find the way to my old home.

I ask where Nanhu Road is. But people look at you with surprise, as if they can’t understand what you are saying. I still speak the village dialect, and anyone who does will always have a village accent. In our village, the word for grandfather is
laoye
. However, the word for “I,” “me,”
or “my” is
wo
, produced between the back palate and the throat, and sounds like
e
, which means “goose.” So
wo laoye
to a non-local sounds like “goose grandfather.” And “goose” asking for directions using the back palate and throat fails to kindle any of that village friendliness in people. When I stop two young women and ask them, they just laugh. “Goose” doesn’t understand why they’re laughing. They laugh so hard, they can’t answer, and their faces look like two pieces of red cloth. Their faces aren’t red because they, too, are wearing bras, but because when I say “Nanhu Road,” I also say
nan
between the back palate and throat, and it sounds funny to them. Later, I find an older man and ask him where the lake used to be. If I know where the lake was, it will be easy to find the stone bridge, and when I find the stone bridge, it will be easy to find Nanhu Road, and when I find Nanhu Road, I’ll be able to feel the way to my old home.

The lake? Which lake? The lake that was filled in. Oh, that lake, the lake that was filled in is right here. He points with his foot. This used to be the lake. So we’re standing on the bottom. Was there once a stone bridge nearby? Can’t you see that there are asphalt roads everywhere? The stone bridges were all demolished and the new ones use reinforced concrete. You understand. You understand that what used to be no longer exists. It is futile to ask about a street and street number that used to exist, you will have to rely on your memory.

My childhood home had an elegant, old-style courtyard. The gate screen had a relief mural inlaid with carved stone images depicting Good Fortune, Prosperity, Longevity, and Happiness. Old Man Longevity, who had half of his head missing, held a dragon-head staff. The dragon’s head had worn away, but we children were absolutely sure that Old Man Longevity’s staff was in the shape of a dragon’s head. The gate screen also had a spotted deer carved in it. The spots, of course, were those faint indentations on the deer’s back. Whenever we went in or out we always touched the antlers, so they became very shiny. The courtyard had two entrances, one in front and one in the back. The bankrupt owner of the house lived in the back courtyard. There was a little girl in that family called Zaowa. She used to stare at me wide-eyed; it was funny but somehow sweet.

That courtyard definitely existed, as did the date trees growing there that my grandfather had planted. And the cages hanging in the eaves held my grandfather’s birds in them. He kept a thrush there and even a mynah. My mother complained about the mynah being noisy, so my grandfather sold it and brought home a red-faced tit. But the tit died soon afterward; these birds are temperamental and shouldn’t be caged. When my grandfather said that it was the tit’s red face that made him fall in love with it, my grandmother scolded him for being shameless. I remember all this. The courtyard was No. 10 Nanhu Road. Even if they’d changed the name of the road and the number,
they wouldn’t have filled in this perfectly good courtyard, as they had that pond of foul water. But I ask everywhere and search street after street and lane after lane. I feel as if I’m rummaging through my pockets; I’ve taken out everything, but still can’t find what I want. In despair I drag along my weary legs, uncertain whether they still belong to me.