Shifu, You'll Do Anything for a Laugh

  Fifty minutes later, the steel door swung open and out stepped the woman, now dressed in street clothes. Her face was red, her eyes bright, the look of a hen that's just laid an egg. She glanced off to the side, as if she didn't even know he was there, and walked off toward the cemetery. Then the man emerged, a bath towel draped over his arm and a bottle of soda in his hand. He walked up to the man and said timidly:

  “Fifty minutes .. .”

  “How much?”

  “It's up to you …”

  The man, also in street clothes, reached into his pocket and pulled out a fifty-yuan bill. He handed it to old Ding, whose hand shook; his heart was racing.

  “I don't have any change,” he said.

  “Keep it,” the man said airily. “We're coming back tomorrow.”

  Crushing the bill in his fist, he thought he might burst into tears.

  “Old man, you're really something!” the man said as he tossed the empty bottle away. “You ought to stock the place with condoms,” he said softly. “That and some cigarettes and beer. Then double the price.”

  Old Ding responded with a deep bow.

  7

  Acting on the man's suggestion, he outfitted his little love cottage with everything couples might need for their trysts, as well as beer, soft drinks, and snacks of dried fish slices and preserved plums. The first time he went to the pharmacy for condoms, he was so embarrassed he couldn't hold his head up or make clear what it was he wanted, to the utter contempt of the young woman behind the counter. As he slinked out of the store with his prophylactic purchase, he heard her say to another clerk behind her:

  “Hey, who'd have thought an old geezer like that still had use for those …”

  But as his business grew with each passing day, so did his nerve and his business sense. No longer flushed with embarrassment when he made his purchases at the pharmacy, he even tried to get the clerk to come down on the price. Brazenly, she remarked:

  “Old man, if you're not some kind of sex fiend, you must be engaged in black market trade in condoms.”

  “I'm both a sex fiend and a black marketer,” he shot back naughtily, looking directly at the woman's scarlet lips.

  Over the three months of summer, he netted forty-eight hundred yuan. And as his purse grew fatter, he grew more cheerful and physically robust by the day. Joints that had turned rusty limbered up, as if newly lubricated, and his eyes, which had seemed frozen in place, were now filled with life. And once his eyes and ears grew attuned to the sights and sounds of his new environment, the torch of intimacy, long extinguished, ignited anew. After he had taken his wife to bed more than once, to her incredible astonishment, she asked him, “What sort of tonic have you been taking, you old fart? Trying to kill yourself?”

  At ten-thirty every morning, he climbed onto his bike and rode over to the cottage, where he first cleaned the place up, dumping all the trash from the previous day into a plastic bag, which he made sure to double-knot. As someone who placed great importance on social conscience, he would never throw his trash just anywhere; no, he carried it into town and properly disposed of it in a trash receptacle. After cleaning up the place, he replenished his stock of drinks, snacks, and other items. That done, he locked the door, picked up his stool, and found a place to wait for the day's clientele, leisurely smoking a cigarette to pass the time. His taste in cigarettes had improved. In the past, he'd smoked only unfiltered Golden City, but now he'd switched to filtered Flying Swallows. In the past, he couldn't bring himself to look his clients in the eye; now he studied them intently. As he gained more experience, he found he could pretty much predict which couples were likely to use his service and which were not. Most of his customers were birds on the prowl, intent on enjoying each other's bodies illicitly; but once in a while a curious married couple or two people in a committed relationship dropped by. There were at least a dozen repeat customers; he always gave them a cut-rate price, usually 20 percent off, but sometimes as much as 50 percent. Some of his customers were the talkative type, and after they'd finished their business, they'd talk his ear off; others were the bashful type, who took off as soon as they'd handed over the money. His storehouse of knowledge about the sex life of young couples was greatly enriched, thanks to his ears alone. The endless variety of sounds, male and female, emerging from the cottage created at least as many pictures in his mind, sort of like throwing open a window onto a vast panorama. One seemingly sickly couple bounced and thudded around the bus so noisily you'd have thought it was a pair of mating elephants in there, not copulating humans. Then there was the couple who started out by shouting and carrying on and ended by slugging it out and smashing beer bottles. But there was nothing he could do about it, since breaking in on them at a time like that could bring nothing but bad luck. The man emerged with a bloody head, the woman with her hair looking like a rat's nest. He felt sorry enough for them to give them a freebie, but the man actually grandstanded by tossing a hundred-yuan note on the ground before strutting off. When he ran after him to give him change, the man turned and spat in his face. The man had thin, sparse eyebrows, sunken eyes, and a mean look; one glare sent old Ding scurrying off abjectly.

  With the arrival of autumn, the poplar leaves began to fall and pine needles darkened. Fewer and fewer people came to swim in the lake, seriously affecting his business; but no day passed without a few clients, especially on Sundays and holidays. This gave him a chance to take it easy, and income was income, even though there might be less of it. It all added up. He came down with a cold about then, but that didn't stop him from going to work. Not wanting to part with his money for cold preparations, he let his wife cook up a pot of ginger soup. He drank down three bowlfuls of the stuff, then covered himself from head to toe and sweated it out. You couldn't ask for a better folk remedy. His plan was to save up as much money as possible for his old age while he was still able. Now that the factory had given him all the severance pay he had coming, the government couldn't be counted on, since even teachers’ pay was slow in coming and the government had to take out loans to pay cadres’ salaries. It was every man for himself, not all that different from grabbing what you could after a natural disaster. There were times when he felt uncomfortable, uncertain if he was a saint or a sinner. One night he dreamed that the police came for him, and he woke up in a cold sweat, his heart racing. He met with his apprentice, Lü Xiaohu, in a quiet little wine shop, and told him what was bothering him.

  “Shifu,” Hu said, “you're not getting goofy on me again, are you? Don't tell me you think your cottage is the only reason those people do it! They'll keep doing it, with or without your cottage. In the woods, in the cemetery, somewhere. Young folks these days are always talking about returning to nature and free love, and who are we to say there's anything wrong with that? They're people, just like us. I told you at the beginning, just pretend you've set up a public toilet in the wild, for which you have every right to charge a modest fee. Shifu, you're head and shoulders above those people who flood the market with their phony alcohol and fake medicine. You have absolutely no reason to be so hard on yourself. Being on good terms with money is more important than trying to be a good son. Without money, you can forget about a loving mother and father, and even your old lady will turn her back on you. Shifu, show some spunk and get on with your business. If there's any trouble, just leave everything to me!”

  Old Ding could find nothing wrong with his apprentice's argument. He's right, he concluded. Sure, there was nothing saintly about what he was doing, but one saint was plenty in this world. Any more was just asking for trouble. The last thing Ding Shikou wanted was to be a saint. Besides, he couldn't even if he wanted to. Ding Shikou, he was thinking, you're doing the government a big favor. Being the master of a love cottage in the woods may not bring you honor, but it's a lot better than causing a scene in front of the government headquarters. This thought brought a smile to his face, which flabbergasted his wife, who was shucking peanuts at the table.

  ?
??What are you smiling about, you old fart?” she asked him. “Do you have any idea how scary a smile like that looks?”

  “Scary?”

  “Yes, scary.”

  “Well, today that's exactly what I want to do, scare you.”

  “Just what do you have in mind, you old fart?” she asked as she backed away, holding a handful of peanut shells. Lightning split the sky outside, heralding a downpour. Cool, damp air seeped into the room, causing the atmosphere inside to actually heat up. He removed his clothes as he bore down on his wife, tossing them behind him; she cowered against the wall, her face turning scarlet, her normally gloomy eyes shining like those of a girl in her prime. Cornered, she flung the peanut shells in his face. “You old fart,” she muttered, “the older you get, the crazier you are .. . the middle of the day. .. what do you think you're doing. … The lord of thunder and mother of lightning are looking at you.” He grabbed her around the waist and bent her backward. “You old fart!” she screamed. “Old fart… not so hard … you're going to break me in half. .. .”

  In order to guard against any unforeseen trouble, Ding deposited his earnings under a phony name and hid the passbook in a hole in the wall, which he sealed with two layers of paper.

  After the winter solstice, the temperature began to drop and there were no clients for two or three days in a row. He rode over to his cottage around noon. Frost clung to the fallen leaves on the ground. The dark yellow sun cast precious little heat. He sat under a tree for a while, until his fingers and toes turned icy cold. The lake was quiet, deserted, except for a man walking in circles by the water's edge, gauze wrapped around his neck. He was a man engaged in a life-and-death struggle with cancer, a bit of a celebrity around town, owing to the fight he was putting up; the local TV station had aired a segment on his struggle. The station had sent a crew down to the lake to film the story, scaring the hell out of Ding. Just to be safe, he'd climbed a tree and perched up there like a bird for over two hours.

  After that incident, a fire inspection team had come to the area, frightening him half to death. This time he'd hidden behind a tree and waited there with his heart in his mouth. One by one the men had walked past his little cottage, but with no visible reaction, as if it were just another of nature's creations. The sole exception was a fat guy who had walked behind the cottage to release a stream of yellow piss. Ding could actually smell it. Our leaders are suffering from too much internal heat, he thought to himself. The fat guy looked to be getting on in years, but he pissed like a youngster: sucking in his gut, he formed a wet circle on the sheet-metal side of the bus, then another and another; but before he could complete the fourth circle, the stream broke off. After taking his young man's leak, the fat guy rapped loudly on one of the sheet-metal window coverings before buttoning his fly and waddling quickly off to catch up with his partners. Just those two frightening episodes.

  The chilled air under the tree was too much for Ding, so he got up and moved into the bus to sit down and have a smoke. After carefully extinguishing his cigarette, he closed his eyes and roughly calculated how much he'd made over the six months or so he'd been in business. The results were gratifying. He decided to come back tomorrow, and if there were still no clients, he'd close up shop until the following spring. If I can keep this up for five years, I'll be in great shape for old age.

  He rode out to the cottage early the next morning. Cold overnight winds had nearly denuded the trees; there were hardly any leaves left on the poplar branches, while those on the few oak trees scattered among the pines held on and turned a golden color. As they rustled in the wind, they looked like yellow butterflies swarming amid the branches. He came equipped with a snakeskin-patterned sack and a steel-tipped wooden staff. He picked up all the litter in the broad vicinity of the little cottage, not for any monetary gain, but out of a sense of obligation. He was a beneficiary of the best that society had to offer. After tying off the trash bag, he placed it on his bicycle rack, then went into the cottage to gather up the assortment of articles. The caw of a solitary crow outside made his heart skip a beat. Taking a look out the door, he spotted a man and a woman walking his way up the gray path from the little hill behind the factory.

  8

  The couple, middle-aged, stopped in front of the cottage. It was half-past noon. The man, his hands thrust into the pockets of his gray windbreaker, was quite tall. The wind behind him billowed the cuffs of his pants and exposed his lower calves. The woman was shorter, but not by much; calling upon his decades of experience in sizing up lengths of iron, old Ding guessed that she was in the neighborhood of five-five or five-six. She was wearing a purple down parka over a pair of light blue jeans and white lambskin shoes. Since neither of them was wearing a hat, their hair was at the mercy of the wind, and the woman frequently reached up to pull her hair back out of her face. As they drew up to the cottage, they subconsciously increased the distance between them, which only served to strengthen the impression that they were lovers, and probably had been for many years. When old Ding saw the cold, pained expression on the man's face and the look of an indignant woman on hers, he knew exactly what was going on between them, as if he'd just finished reading their dossiers.

  He decided to stay open for one final pair of clients, not because of the money, but because his heart went out to them.

  The man spoke to old Ding in front of the cottage, while the woman stood with her back to the door, her hands in the pockets of her parka, as she absentmindedly kicked at some leaves on the ground.

  “It sure turned cold today,” the man said. “All of a sudden, like. Not normal.”

  “On TV they say it's a cold front down from Siberia,” old Ding said, reminding himself that he ought to get rid of the old black-and-white TV at home.

  “So this is the famous lovers’ cottage,” the man said. “I hear it's the brainchild of the Chief of Police's father-in-law.”

  Old Ding just smiled and shook his head, which could have meant almost anything.

  “Actually,” the man said, “all we're looking for is a quiet spot so we can talk.”

  Old Ding gave him an understanding smile, picked up his stool, and headed over to the locust grove without so much as a backward glance.

  Sunbeams burst from a gray cloud, flooding the woods with dazzling light. The locust tree seemed covered with a layer of tinfoil, glittery and magical. As he leaned against the springy limbs of the tree, powerful gusts of a northeast wind felt as if they had turned his spine into cold metal. The man stepped into the cottage, bent at the waist. The woman stood off to one side of the doorway, her head lowered, as if deep in thought. The man emerged from the cottage and walked up behind the woman to whisper something. There was no change in her demeanor. So the man reached out and gently tugged at the hem of her coat. She squirmed, a childish movement, like a little girl's display of temper. The man rested his hand on her shoulder, and even though she continued to squirm, she did not shake off his hand. So he pressed down and turned her toward him; she put up mild resistance, but ultimately turned to face him. Then, with both hands on her shoulders, he spoke to her — to the top of her head, actually. At last, he ushered her into the cottage.

  Hidden from view beneath the locust tree, old Ding smiled. The metal door closed with a soft click; he then heard the barely perceptible turning of the lock. With that sound, the little cottage became another dead object in the wintry woods, touched from time to time by the sun's cold and desolate rays, giving off brief bursts of murky reflections. Tan-feathered sparrows shitting on the roof of the cottage flitted back and forth, raising a chorus of chirpings. Monstrous, bloated gray clouds sped across the sky, their dark shadows skittering across the wooded ground. He looked at his pocket watch — it was one o'clock. He didn't expect them to be in there long, probably no more than an hour. He'd been about to go home for lunch when these last two “uninvited guests” had showed up. He was getting hungry, and cold, but he'd have to wait them out before heading home. They were, after al
l, paying by the hour, so he had no right to ask them to leave before they were ready. Some of the couples stayed inside for up to three hours. Up till now, he'd have been happy if his clients had locked themselves inside and slept for eight or ten hours. But with the wind chilling him to the bone and the pangs of hunger growing stronger, he wished they would finish their business quickly and come out. He passed the time by digging a little hole in the ground in front of him with his walking stick, then lighting up a cigarette. Always conscious of the fire danger in a wooded area, he carefully flicked his ashes into the hole.

  He'd been sitting under the tree for about half an hour when he heard muted sobs from inside the cottage. A gust of wind set the leaves rustling loudly enough to swallow up the sobs. But as soon as the wind died down, the sobs found their way back into his ears. He sighed sympathetically. This was the sort of romance lovers like that deserved; theirs was a classical, tragic love, like cucumbers in a pickling vat — all salt, no sugar. Young folks these days have gotten away from that. When they're in the cottage, they take advantage of every second, going at it hot and heavy. They scream lecherously, they moan, some of them fill the air with obscenities that make the birds blush. They all do the same thing, but the way they go about it couldn't be more different. By studying the intimate sounds of the men and women, he gained an understanding into changes in people's concepts. Deep down in his heart, he preferred a tearful love, which seemed more dramatic, somehow. As he listened to the sobs and whimpers, he thought about their story: it had to be a sentimental one, a romantic tragedy. For a number of reasons, marriage was not in the cards for them. Maybe, after being separated by a vast distance, this man and woman had come together to meet secretly. Viewed from that angle, he thought, I'm actually a good Samaritan.

  He let his thoughts ramble for another hour before getting to his feet to limber up his achy joints and massage his nearly frozen earlobes. It was time to pack up and go home. He decided that the only way to feel good about how things had worked out was to charge them a nominal fee, then stop at the Lanzhou Noodle Restaurant in town for a bowl of beef noodles. The mere thought of those noodles had his stomach rumbling and his teeth chattering. He was damned hungry, and damned cold. It was unseasonably cold, abnormally cold, ridiculously cold, colder than the coldest days of winter last year. The woman's sobs had stopped, leaving the metal cottage perfectly still, quiet as a graveyard. A crow with a piece of intestine in its beak flew up from some distant place and landed in its nest in a poplar tree.