The Seventh Day

THE SIXTH DAY

After many hesitant twists and turns, a young man made his way here, bringing to Mouse Girl news of her boyfriend in that other world.

Looking in dazed confusion at the green grass and the dense trees and the people walking about — many skeletal, some still fleshed — he said to himself, “How did I end up here?”

“It seems like five days now,” he went on. “I have been walking around all this time, and I don’t know how I ended up here.”

A voice piped up. “Some come here just a day after they die, but some take several days.”

“I died?” he said perplexedly.

“You didn’t go to the funeral parlor?” that same voice asked.

“The funeral parlor?” he asked. “Why would I go there?”

“Everyone has to go to the funeral parlor for cremation after they die.”

“You’ve all been cremated?” He looked at us in wonder. “You don’t look like ashes to me.”

“We haven’t been cremated.”

“Did you not go to the funeral parlor, then?”

“No, we’ve been there.”

“If you went, why weren’t you cremated?”

“We have no burial grounds.”

“I have no burial ground, either,” he muttered to himself. “How could I have died?”

“The people who come over after you will tell you,” another voice broke in.

He shook his head. “Just now I ran into someone who said he had just got here. He didn’t know me and didn’t know how I got here, and didn’t know how he got here, either.”

I was about to go over to the cremation waiting room to see my father, but the arrival of this young man made me stop in my tracks. His body looked somehow flattened, with an odd stain on the breast of his jacket. After studying it carefully, I detected the marks left by a car tire.

“Can you remember the final scene?” I asked.

“What final scene?”

“Think about it,” I said. “What happened at the end?”

From his expression I could tell he was trying hard to remember. “All I recall was very thick fog as I waited in the street for a bus — I don’t remember anything else,” he said eventually.

I thought back to that scene in the thick fog when I left my rental room on the first day — how as I passed a bus stop I heard the roar of cars colliding and how one car sped out of the thick fog and then there was a clamor of screams.

“Were you standing next to a bus stop?” I asked.

He thought for a moment. “That’s right, I was.”

“Did the sign list the 203 bus?”

He nodded. “Yes, it did. The 203 bus was the one I was waiting for.”

“It was a car accident that brought you here,” I told him. “There’s the mark of a car tire on your jacket.”

“I died in a car crash?” He lowered his head to look down at his chest and seemed to understand. “I do seem to remember something knocking me down and running over me.”

He looked at me and then at the skeletons close by. “You’re different from them,” he said.

“I just arrived a few days ago,” I said. “They’ve been here a long time.”

“Soon you’ll be just like us,” one skeleton said.

“Once spring is over — and the summer too,” I said. “We’ll be just like them.”

An uneasy expression appeared on his face. “Does it hurt a lot?” he asked.

“Not at all,” the skeleton said. “It’s just like tree leaves falling one by one in the autumn wind.”

“But a tree will always sprout more leaves,” he said.

“We’re not going to sprout again,” the skeleton said.

He nodded thoughtfully. “I understand.”

At this point a woman’s voice could be heard. “Xiao Qing!”

“I think someone is calling me,” he said.

“Xiao Qing!” the voice called again.

“That’s strange. There’s someone here who knows me.” He looked about in puzzlement.

“Xiao Qing, I’m here.”

Mouse Girl was approaching, dressed in a pair of pants so long she was treading on their cuffs. This young man looked at her in astonishment. He had heard her before he saw her.

“Hi, Xiao Qing! I’m Mouse Girl.”

“You don’t sound like her, but you do look like her.”

“I really am Mouse Girl.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

Mouse Girl came up to us. “How come you’re here too?” she asked Xiao Qing.

He pointed at his chest. “Car accident.”

Mouse Girl looked at the mark on his jacket. “What’s that?”

“A car ran me over,” Xiao Qing said.

“Did it hurt a lot?” Mouse Girl asked.

Xiao Qing thought this over. “I don’t remember. I may have cried out.”

Mouse Girl nodded. “Have you seen Wu Chao?” she asked.

“Yes, I have,” he said.

“When was that?”

“The day before I came here.”

Mouse Girl turned around and told us that in the world over there Xiao Qing had been another member of the mouse tribe. She and her boyfriend, Wu Chao, had known Xiao Qing for over a year. They were below-ground neighbors.

“Does Wu Chao know what happened to me?”

“Yes, he does,” Xiao Qing said. “He bought a burial plot for you.”

“He bought a burial plot for me?”

“Yes. He gave me the money and asked me to buy you a burial plot.”

“Where did he get the money?”

When Mouse Girl fell to her death, Wu Chao was back home with his father. Later, the old man’s condition stabilized, but it was late at night when Wu Chao made it back to the underground rental in the city. He didn’t see Mouse Girl and he softly called her name a few times, but there was no answer. Their neighbors were all asleep, so he made his way along the narrow passageway, listening for the sound of human voices, thinking that Mouse Girl perhaps was chatting with someone behind a curtain. He heard nothing but snores and dreamy murmurs and the occasional baby wailing. It occurred to him that Mouse Girl might be in an Internet bar chatting with someone online. As he headed toward the bomb shelter exit he ran into Xiao Qing, just returning from his night shift. Xiao Qing told him of Mouse Girl’s death three days earlier.

Wu Chao at first did not seem to react when he heard that Mouse Girl had thrown herself off the Pengfei Tower, but a moment later his whole body started trembling and he kept shaking his head. “That’s impossible! Impossible!” he cried, and he dashed toward the exit.

Wu Chao ran into the Internet bar that was closest to the shelter, sat down in front of a computer, and read Mouse Girl’s log on QQ space. He also read a news report about her suicide. Now he knew for sure that Mouse Girl had left him forever.

Frozen in shock, he sat in front of the glaring monitor for many minutes, until the screen went black; only then did he get up and leave the Internet bar. When a stranger walked past in the late-night silence, Wu Chao turned to him and said, in a shaky voice, “Mouse Girl is dead.”

The stranger gave a start, as though he had run into a lunatic, and quickly crossed to the other side of the street, looking back at him warily.

Wu Chao roamed like a wraith through the night-bound city, in a piercing cold wind. He walked aimlessly, impervious to how far he had gone or where he was, and even when passing the Pengfei Tower he did not raise his head to look. As day broke he still had not emerged from his daze. Among the crowds of jostling people on their way to work, he kept saying over and over again, “Mouse Girl is dead.”

His words were greeted with indifference. Only one pedestrian took note of his emotional state and asked him curiously, “Who is Mouse Girl?”

He thought about this blankly for a moment before answering, “Liu Mei.” The man shook his head and said he didn’t know her, then disappeared around a corner. “She’s my girlfriend,” Wu Chao muttered.

It was not until the end of the day that Wu Chao returned to his underground home. He lay down distractedly on the bed that he and Mouse Girl used to share. Eventually he fell asleep, but he kept waking up, tears in his eyes.

The next day he neither wept nor sobbed but simply lay in bed, unable to sleep and with no appetite for meals, listening blankly to the sounds of his neighbors stir-frying and chatting and the noise of children running around and shouting. He didn’t know what they were doing or what they were saying, and was conscious only of their ebb and flow.

He sank into a deep crevasse of memory, haunted by sudden visions of Mouse Girl, sometimes buoyant, sometimes fretful. Eventually he came to the realization that his most pressing task now was to ensure that she could enjoy proper rest. During her short life she had had many dreams, but practically none of these had he enabled her to fulfill. She had often griped about that, but just as often she had forgotten to gripe, looking forward instead to new prospects. He now felt sure that having a grave of her own must have been her final wish, but this was yet another area in which he seemed likely to fail her.

At this point, amid all the background din, somebody’s words carried to him clearly. The man was talking about an acquaintance who had made over thirty thousand yuan from selling a kidney.

Wu Chao sat up in bed, thinking that with that kind of money he could buy a burial plot for Mouse Girl.

He left the bomb shelter and entered the Internet bar. He searched online until he found a phone number. He borrowed a pen and wrote the number on the palm of his hand, then went out to a pay phone and called the number. The person who picked up the phone peppered him with questions until he was sure that Wu Chao was serious, then set up an appointment for them to meet at the Pengfei Tower. Wu Chao couldn’t help giving a shiver when he heard the name.

He arrived at the appointed spot to find the street filled with a clamor of cars and people; he and his shadow huddled together at the foot of the Pengfei Tower. One car after another drove into or emerged from the underground parking lot next to him. Several times he looked up at the piercing sunlight reflected from the tower’s glass windows, but he had no idea where Mouse Girl had stood that day.

A man in a black down jacket came up to him. “You’re Wu Chao?” he muttered.

Wu Chao nodded.

“Follow me,” the man said quietly.

They boarded a crowded bus. A few stops later they disembarked, then boarded another bus. After taking six different buses, they seemed to have reached the outskirts of town. Wu Chao accompanied the man to the entrance gate of a housing development. The man told Wu Chao to go on inside, while he stood by the gate and placed a call on his cell phone. As Wu Chao entered this drab development, he noticed a man emerging from a building not far away. The man tossed his cigarette on the ground and stamped it out as Wu Chao approached. “Selling a kidney?” he asked.

Wu Chao nodded. The man beckoned with his hand, indicating he should follow him into the building. They went down a stained concrete staircase to the basement. The man opened a door, and the air was suddenly rank with the odor of stale cigarette smoke. By a dim light Wu Chao could make out seven people inside, sitting on beds, smoking and chatting. Wu Chao headed for the one unoccupied bed.

Wu Chao handed over his ID and signed an agreement to sell a kidney. He was given a medical examination and a blood sample was taken, then he was told to await the result. He began another underground life, sleeping under a greasy quilt, a quilt that looked as though it had never been washed, and that exuded foul smells accumulated from its many previous users. The man who had brought him to the basement visited twice a day, issuing to the men inside packs of cheap cigarettes and two meals — cabbage and potato for lunch, potato and cabbage for dinner. The room had neither tables nor chairs, so they all sat on their beds to eat, apart from two who squatted on their haunches. The fetid odor that wafted through the basement was held in check only when the men were smoking. When they slept, Wu Chao would wake up sometimes, oppressed by such a powerful stench he felt as though his chest were being squeezed.

The other men, all young, chatted idly as they smoked, exchanging notes about conditions at construction sites and factories and moving companies — it seemed they had worked in lots of different places. Making a pot of money quickly was now their goal: even if they were to slave away as coolies for years and years, they said, they would still not be able to make as much money as if they were to sell a kidney. They were looking forward eagerly to life afterward, when they could buy a smart set of clothes, an Apple phone, stay a few nights in a swank hotel, and eat some meals in an upscale restaurant. After indulging in these expectations, they lapsed back into anxiety, for none of the seven had yet received word that he had been successfully matched with an organ recipient, despite waiting here for over a month. One of them had already visited similar outfits in five other cities, and each time had been sent packing within a matter of weeks, on the grounds that nobody wanted his kidney. The kidney vendors would give him only forty-five yuan for traveling expenses, money he would use to buy his way to another kidney-selling operation. He said that he had not a penny to his name, so all he could do was try like a beggar to keep life and limb together, in one kidney-selling den after another.

This man had seen a lot of the world, and when someone complained how tedious the diet was here — just cabbage and potato — he said it couldn’t be considered bad, for here you at least got tofu once a week and chicken-bone soup once a week as well. He said he’d stayed in a kidney-selling den where for two months straight he ate disgusting food every day of the week.

Somebody raised a question about the safety of kidney surgery. There was, the kidney-racket veteran announced in a tone of authority, no simple answer to that — it was very much a matter of luck. Kidney vendors, he informed them, were an unscrupulous bunch — people with a conscience wouldn’t get involved in this kind of business — and to save money they didn’t hire professional surgeons, who would demand a high price for their services; kidney vendors would bring in veterinary surgeons instead.

When they heard it was going to be vets removing their kidneys, the other men were outraged, cursing the damn vendors for jeopardizing their health just so they could maximize profits.

This man took it all in stride, however, saying, “These days there’s no shortage of wicked people and outrageous behavior, is there? And besides, a vet still counts as a surgeon, and if he makes a habit of cutting out people’s kidneys, he will soon become an old hand and his technique might even be superior to that of a surgeon in a proper hospital.”

What outraged him was that nobody wanted his kidney. He said he’d had rotten luck the whole time, never once matched with a transplant recipient. Every year, he said, there were a million people suffering from kidney disease who depended on dialysis for survival, but there were only about four thousand legal kidney transplants. How was it possible that nobody wanted his kidney? There should be a million people who need it! The only explanation was that those sons of bitches responsible for matching patient and donor were failing to apply themselves properly to their work, with the result that his perfectly good kidney had gone neglected for almost a year now. If this time, too, he was given his marching orders, he said, he was going first to burn some incense in a temple and beg the bodhisattva to help him sell his kidney in double-quick time, and then get another train ticket and head off to the next kidney-selling den.

Wu Chao said nothing after arriving in the basement, but simply listened indifferently as the men gossiped about this and that, and even when he heard how veterinary surgeons performed the operations, he remained unmoved; it was only when he thought of Mouse Girl that his heart would ache. He prayed that he would be matched successfully as soon as possible, so that he could purchase a burial plot for Mouse Girl with minimum delay. But the seven men in the basement had already been waiting so long, and one had yet to be matched successfully even after almost a year, and this made him deeply anxious. He was stricken with insomnia; on his soiled and smelly bed he tossed and turned, unable to fall asleep.

On Wu Chao’s sixth day in the basement, the meal-delivery man appeared at a different time than usual. He opened the door and called, “Wu Chao!”

Before Wu Chao had time to react, the other seven men in the basement looked at each other and realized that none of them had this name — Wu Chao had to be the one who had said not a word since his arrival. “So soon!” they exclaimed.

“Wu Chao, you’ve got a match,” the man at the doorway said.

Wu Chao flung aside the greasy quilt and put on his clothes and shoes under the envious gaze of the other seven. As he walked toward the door, the man who had visited kidney-selling dens in five cities spoke up. “You’re a sly one,” he said.

Wu Chao followed the meal-delivery man up the stained cement staircase to the fourth floor. The man knocked on a door, and when it was opened, Wu Chao found a middle-aged man sitting on a sofa inside the room. This person greeted Wu Chao warmly and had him sit down next to him, then began to explain that the human body actually requires just one kidney, so the other is redundant — like an appendix, which you can keep or remove as you wish.

Wu Chao was not interested in these issues. “How much will I get for my kidney?” he asked the middle-aged man.

“Thirty-five thousand,” the man replied.

Wu Chao thought this sufficient for his purposes, so he nodded.

“We pay top price here,” the man said. “Other places pay only thirty.”

No need to worry about the surgery, he assured Wu Chao, for the doctors they used were all from big hospitals and were just taking on these jobs for extra income.

“They say that it’s vets who do the operation,” Wu Chao responded.

“That’s bullshit!” the middle-aged man said, looking displeased. “Our doctors are all fully trained surgeons, and we pay them five thousand for every kidney removal.”

Wu Chao moved into a room on the fifth floor. It had four beds, only one of which was occupied. The person there was a man who had already had a kidney removed, and he gave his new roommate a friendly smile, which Wu Chao returned.

This man’s operation had been successful, and he was able to prop himself up against the bedstead to talk with Wu Chao. He said he no longer had a fever and would be able to leave in another few days. He asked Wu Chao why he was selling his kidney.

Wu Chao lowered his head in thought. “For my girlfriend,” he said.

“Same as me,” the other man said.

He had a steady girlfriend back in the countryside, he told Wu Chao. He wanted to marry her, but her parents insisted he needed to have a house first. So he took a job in the city, but the money he made was pitiful — he would need to work nine or ten years before he’d have enough to build a house, and his girlfriend would have married someone else long before that. Selling his kidney was the quickest way to finance the house construction.

“This money comes easy,” he said.

He gave a laugh. That’s just the way it was back home, he said — if you don’t have a house, you can forget about marriage. “Is it the same where you’re from?” he asked.

Wu Chao nodded. His eyes suddenly got wet, for he thought of Mouse Girl and how she had stuck with him through thick and thin despite his poverty and failures in life. He bowed his head, not wanting his tears to be seen.

After a moment he raised his head. “Didn’t your girlfriend want to leave and get a job in the city as well?”

“She wanted to,” the man said, “but her father was bedridden and her mother was in poor health too. She’s their only daughter — they have no sons — so she can’t get away.”

Wu Chao thought of Mouse Girl’s fate. “Maybe it’s better that way.”

Life on the fifth floor was a complete contrast to life in the basement. There was no foul air and the quilt was clean. There was natural light. In the morning Wu Chao could eat an egg, a meat bun, and a bowl of congee; at midday and in the evening he ate boxed meals with either meat or fish.

Wu Chao woke up in sunlight and fell asleep by moonlight—sensations long denied him, since for a year or more he had woken and slept in an underground world with neither sun nor moon. Now he appreciated their beauty, and even when he closed his eyes he could feel how they brightened the room. Outside his window was a tree that had turned dry and yellow in the winter cold, but even so, birds would fly over and rest on its limbs, sometimes chirping away, then flapping their wings and soaring over the rooftops. He thought of Mouse Girl and how she too had never experienced this kind of life during their time together. He couldn’t help but feel sad.

Three days later, Wu Chao followed the middle-aged man into a windowless room. A man wearing glasses who looked like he might be a doctor asked him to lie down on a crude operating table. A powerful light shone in his face, and even after he closed his eyes they still felt sore. With the anesthetic, he lost consciousness, and when he came around he found himself lying on his bed on the fifth floor once more. The room was completely silent, for the man who had been there was now gone and Wu Chao was the only occupant. Next to his pillow lay a bag of antibiotics and a bottle of mineral water. At the slightest movement he felt an acute stab of pain in his left side, and he knew he’d lost his left kidney.

The middle-aged man came by twice a day to make sure he took the antibiotics at the proper time. The man told him that he would be able to go back home in a week. Wu Chao lay alone in the room; his only other visitors were the birds. Some would flit past his window, while others would linger briefly on the branches outside, their raucous jabber sounding to his ears like idle chatter.

After a week the middle-aged man gave him thirty-five thousand yuan in cash, summoned a taxi, and sent two of his underlings to see him back to his home in the bomb shelter.

Wu Chao’s neighbors, seeing two strangers carry him in and lay him on his bed, knew he must have sold a kidney so that Mouse Girl could get a proper burial.

Wu Chao lay in bed. After a few more days he had finished all the antibiotics, but his high fever had not abated and on several occasions he lapsed into unconsciousness; when he came to, he felt that his body was on the point of leaving him. His underground neighbors came to visit him and bring him snacks, but he was able only to swallow a very little bit of congee or soup. Several neighbors said they should take him to the hospital, but he shook his head emphatically, for he knew that if he was admitted to the hospital he could say goodbye to all the money he made from selling his kidney. He believed he could get through this, but his confidence weakened with every passing day, and as the frequency of his fainting spells increased he knew he wouldn’t be fit enough to make the selection of Mouse Girl’s burial plot. For this he cried tears of frustration.

Once, Wu Chao woke from unconsciousness and asked in a feeble voice of the neighbors who sat by his side, “Was that a bird?”

“There’s no birds,” the neighbors said.

“I heard a bird calling,” Wu Chao continued weakly.

“I saw a bat on my way here,” one of the neighbors said.

“Not a bat,” Wu Chao said, “a bird.”

Xiao Qing said that the last time he went to see him, Wu Chao found it hard even to open his eyes. It was then that he begged Xiao Qing to help. He told him that there was thirty-five thousand yuan hidden under his pillow and asked him to use thirty-three thousand to buy a burial plot for Mouse Girl, a good-quality tombstone, and an urn for her ashes. The remaining two thousand he said he needed to keep for himself, so that he could come out of this alive and sweep Mouse Girl’s grave at the Qingming Festival in future years.

After saying all this, he turned with a moan and had Xiao Qing take the money out from underneath the pillow. The words “The grave of the Mouse Girl I love” were to be carved on the tombstone, he instructed Xiao Qing, with his own name below. Just as Xiao Qing was leaving, money in hand, Wu Chao called him back in a whisper and told him to change “Mouse Girl” to “Liu Mei.”

Mouse Girl was weeping. The sound of her sobs spilled over every face and body here, like the patter of rain on plantain leaves. With the twenty-seven babies warbling in the background, her sobs seemed all the more wrenching.

Many of the skeletal people listened raptly and asked each other who was singing, singing so sadly. Others said it wasn’t singing but sobbing, it was the pretty girl — the new arrival — who was sobbing, the pretty girl in the man’s pants, pants that were long and wide. Every day she’d been walking back and forth and tramping on her pant legs, but now she was sitting on the ground and crying.

Mouse Girl sat amid the riverside greenery, her back against a tree, her legs screened by grass and blossoming wildflowers, the river gurgling close by. As she hummed her song of lamentation, the teardrops on her face looked like morning dew clinging to tree leaves. She was making a dress out of the pair of pants.

Xiao Qing stood close to Mouse Girl. As stationary as a street sign, he watched as skeletal people — and a dozen or more fleshed people — approached from all directions, forming an ever-denser throng. They stood close, listening attentively to Xiao Qing’s story. From his expression one could sense that Xiao Qing was on the road to forgetting, for his account was muddled, like an effort to piece together disjointed, incomplete dream sequences.

Everybody came over, excited by the knowledge that Mouse Girl could proceed to her resting place. They talked in hushed voices about how nobody so far had ever left this place and how Mouse Girl was the first, and how, moreover, her body and her beauty were fully intact.

Everyone in this huge crowd was eager to take a closer look at Mouse Girl as she sat sewing her dress among the grasses and beneath the trees, and so they circulated around her, interweaving in an orderly fashion, some pressing forward, others hanging back, like banks of waves forming in the ocean, every one of them blessing with a silent glance this lovely young woman who was about to proceed to her resting place.

An old voice emerged from the crowd that was circling Mouse Girl. “My child, you should bathe,” the voice said, as Mouse Girl bowed her head and wept and sewed her dress.

Mouse Girl raised her tear-stained face and looked in astonishment at this skeleton with the old voice.

“Soon you’ll be interred,” the old voice continued. “So you should bathe now.”

“I haven’t finished the dress,” Mouse Girl said.

“We’ll do it for you,” many women’s voices said.

Dozens of female skeletons came up to Mouse Girl and dozens of pairs of hands reached out to her. Mouse Girl lifted the unfinished dress, unsure into which pair of hands she should place it. “We used to work in a clothing factory,” two voices said to her.

Mouse Girl passed them the unfinished dress, then looked up at the old skeleton standing in front of her and asked with some embarrassment, “Can I keep my clothes on?”

The old skeleton shook his head. “You can’t bathe if you’re dressed.”

Mouse Girl lowered her head and in a slow movement let her outer clothes leave her body, then her underwear. When her legs emerged among the grasses and the blossoming wildflowers, she was completely unclothed. Lovely Mouse Girl lay on her back among the grasses and wildflowers, and after putting her legs together she folded her hands across her chest, then closed her eyes, as though entering a dreamlike serenity. The grasses and wildflowers growing so profusely around her lowered their heads and bent at the waist as though lost in admiration, their gaze concealing her body from onlookers. Thus she was hidden from view, and we saw only the grasses spreading and the wildflowers blooming.

“People over there make distinctions between family and strangers,” the hoary old skeleton continued, “but there are no such demarcations here. With interments over there one needs to be bathed by one’s kith and kin, but here we are all her family and we all need to bathe her. People there use bowls of water to bathe a body; here we cup our hands to make a bowl.”

Saying this, the old skeleton picked off a tree leaf, cupped it in his hand, and walked over to the stream. The crowd circling Mouse Girl made an orderly line, each one picking a leaf and cupping it in his or her hands, creating a long, long line of cups made of tree leaves, following the old skeleton to the riverside. Like a strand pulled from a ball of thread, they stretched out in a longer and longer arc. The old skeleton was the first to squat down, and after scooping up water in the bowl made by the tree leaf cupped in his hand, he got up and came walking back, and the people who followed him did the same. The old skeleton went up to where Mouse Girl lay, and after opening his hands sprinkled the water from his leaf bowl on top of the grass and wildflowers that covered Mouse Girl’s body. The grass and the flowers, sprinkled with the river water, trembled and shook, moistening Mouse Girl.

The old skeleton now began to walk off, holding the wet leaf in his left hand and wiping his eyes with his right, as though wiping away tears when parting from a loved one. Those behind followed suit, walking over to Mouse Girl with their leaf cups and sprinkling her with the cleansing water. They trailed behind the old skeleton, the line of them stretching away into the distance like a serpentine path. Some carried a leaf in their left hand, some in their right, and the leaves dripped their final droplets in the gentle breeze.

The thirty-eight victims of the department store fire had been walking back and forth in a group, but now they separated, each squatting down to scoop up water, then one by one walking over to Mouse Girl and sprinkling the grass and flowers so that her body was washed from head to toe. The little girl began to sob, and so did the little boy, and the other thirty-six gave sympathetic sobs of their own. Although they moved separately, their sobs reminded us that they were a tight-knit group.

Tan Jiaxin and his family were also in this long procession. They too gathered river water in their cupped hands and slowly approached the spot where Mouse Girl lay, and they sprinkled their benediction as Mouse Girl prepared to go to her resting place. As Tan Jiaxin’s daughter moved on, she wiped her tears with both hands and her body gave a little tremor; the leaf in her hand drifted to the ground. Where was her resting place going to be? she wondered. Tan Jiaxin stretched out an arm and patted her on the shoulder, saying, “So long as everyone is together, one place is as good as another.”

Zhang Gang and Li, the two board game enthusiasts and inveterate arguers, also arrived. They piously filled their leaf cups and sprinkled the contents over Mouse Girl’s grass-and-flower blanket. Noting a wistful look on Li’s face, Zhang Gang patted his skeletal shoulder with his own skeletal hand. “Don’t feel you have to wait for me — you can go on ahead, you know,” he said.

Li shook his head. “We haven’t finished our game.”

The crowd of people who had left after bathing Mouse Girl’s body now formed several long lines stretching into the distance, while people in other long lines continued to queue up to bathe Mouse Girl — it seemed that this ceremony had a long way to go. Zheng Xiaomin’s parents also arrived, her mother still ill at ease, huddling herself up, her hands on her thighs, her father sticking close to his wife, hugging her as though eager to cover her. They separated, however, to pick leaves and scoop up water, and then the man, closely followed by his wife, led the way, as they moved along in the queue.

Again the nightingale song burst forth, but only in brief snatches. Li Yuezhen walked over slowly in her white clothes, with the twenty-seven babies forming a line and singing as they followed behind her. Perhaps the grass was tickling the babies’ necks, for giggles often interrupted their beautiful song. Li Yuezhen carried the babies one by one to the broad tree leaves beside the river. As the babies lay on the leaves that swayed in the breeze, their song was no longer intermittent, but flowed freely like the river water itself.

Mouse Girl, surrounded by grass and flowers, heard the nightingale chorus rising and falling on all sides, and without conscious effort she began to sing the babies’ song. Mouse Girl became the lead member of the choir. She would sing a line and the babies would follow; she would sing another line and they would follow that; and the lead and the chorus would repeat themselves over and over, as though they had rehearsed this in advance, and Mouse Girl’s and the babies’ songs rose and fell, rose and fell.

My footsteps, originally heading on a path toward the funeral parlor, toward my father, still lingered here.