Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

provided life-giving calories and nutrition.
    I leaned against the window with my binoculars, prepared for my daily ritual. The clock in my head was remarkably accurate. Since in those days the town had no tall buildings, nothing blocked my view. If I’d wanted to I could have brought the faces of the old folks doing their morning exercises in Tianhua Square right into my eyes. First I aimed my binoculars at the entrance to Tianhua Lane. One Tianhua Lane was my house. The gate was closed. My son’s enemies had drawn a picture and written slogans in chalk on the gate: a fanged little boy, half of whose face was filled in with chalk, the other not. He was holding his sticklike hands in the air, a sign of surrender. Down between his sticklike legs hung an enormous penis from which a single line ran all the way down to the bottom of the gate.
    I lowered my binoculars, which spat out Tianhua Square and Tianhua Lane. My heart skipped a beat. There was Huang Hezuo, straining to walk her bicycle down the three steps outside the gate. She spotted the graffiti when she turned to lock the gate, so she parked her bike, looked around, and crossed the street, where she broke off a branch of the pine tree there and used it to wipe off as much of the chalk as possible. I couldn’t see her face, but I knew she’d be grumbling. After the chalk was smeared beyond recognition, she got on her bike and headed north for a dozen yards or so before disappearing behind a row of houses. How had she managed to get through the night? Had she lain awake or had she slept like a baby? No way to know. Though there’d never been a time during all these years that I’d actually loved her, she was, after all, the mother of my son, and our lives had been closely bound up together. She reappeared on the road leading to the square in front of the station. Even when she was riding a bicycle she wobbled, and now more than ever, since she looked to be in a tearing hurry. Now I could see her face, which seemed covered by a smoky veil. She was wearing a black top with a yellow phoenix design. I knew she had plenty of clothes; on a business trip once, probably driven by deep-seated guilt feelings, I’d bought her a dozen skirts, all of which she’d immediately put away at the bottom of a trunk and never wore. I thought she might glance over at my window when she passed by the government office building, but she didn’t. She looked straight ahead, and I heaved a sigh. I knew that this woman was not about to give me my freedom, not without a fight. But since the battle had begun, it would have to be a fight to the finish.
    Once again I trained my binoculars on the door of my house on Tianhua Lane, which was actually a wide boulevard, the preferred route by parents taking their children to the Phoenix Elementary School in the southern district. It was teeming with parents and children at this early morning hour.
    My son and his dog walked out the gate, dog first, followed by the boy, who opened one side a crack and slipped through. Clever boy. If he’d opened both sides, he’d have had to turn around and close them both, a waste of time and energy. After locking up, he jumped from the top step to the sidewalk and headed north. I saw him wave to a boy riding by on a bike; the dog barked at the boy. They walked past the Tianhua Barbershop, which was directly opposite a shop that made home aquariums and sold tropical fish. The south-facing door showed up bright in the morning sunlight. The shopkeeper, a retired bookkeeper who’d worked at a cotton storage and transportation station, was a dignified old man who displayed his fish in aquariums out on the sidewalk. My son and his dog stopped to watch the ungraceful movements of big-bellied goldfish. The shopkeeper appeared to say something to my son, whose head was too low for me to see his mouth. He might have answered, he might not have.
    They were back on the road, heading north, and when they reached the Tianhua Bridge, my son appeared to want to go down to the water, but the dog grabbed his clothes in his teeth to stop him. A good, loyal companion. My son struggled to get free, but was no match for the dog. Finally, he picked up a piece of brick and threw it into the water; it landed with a splash. A yellow dog greeted our dog with a bark and a wagging tail. The green plastic awning over the farmer’s market sparkled in the bright sunlight. My son stopped at just about every shop along the way, but the