英文小说：A Shadow in Surfers Paradise(34)天堂之影

洋八路

Chapter 34




The next morning, among the faint noises of little sparrows, he awoke from a sleep or a death, looking at the grey hollowness of the Shanghai sky.

If he still had some illusion about her yesterday, now he knew he had certainly lost her complete. He was a hand bag she had once carried, and perhaps cared and wanted for a while, and then, without mercy, discarded.

Feeling too weak to attend the class, he wandered about the park, staring at some old, spine-bent people doing their life-lasting Qigong exercise, as if it was a pleasant thing living in such a senile condition. Human beings, a special class of animal created by some odd and illogic nature, desired so much to live, to perpetuate their meagre breath, yet like all the creatures on the earth they still have sooner or later to die. Oh, what a piteous, helpless life!

In the mid-morning, he reached his room. He climbed onto his bed, closed the tent tight, lay himself down, pulled the quilt over him, over his head, and thus safely wrapped up, he continued to consume his sorrow with little air and temperature circulating his half-wasted body.

He heard Kang calling his name; the voice was unreal, more like in a dream. Turning over, he found Kang’s face so close to him.  

‘What is wrong? Are you sick?’

Bing smiled a smile with the shadow of a cry. ‘No, I am all right.’

‘Where did you stay last night?’ Kang pursued, ‘you were still not in the bed when I got up this morning.’

‘I stayed in my country-fellow’s,’ he lied hastily, finding it hard to bear Kang’s look of so much concern.

‘Then why didn’t you attend the class?’   

Bing didn’t reply to him; he couldn’t, for at this moment a sudden rush of tears made him incapable of words.

Kang was startled.

Bing turned away, as if he had to hide his emotions in the presence of his friend.

He felt Kang pat once on his shoulder, and heard him sitting down on his own bed.

The following silence was then broken by the rustles of other roommates who had also come back from the afternoon class. Restoring his composure and knowing Kang was still in the room, Bing turned and said to him, ‘Kang, I am all right, you go to your basketball training.’

‘No, I am not going today.’

‘Why? I am fine,’ he smiled, still with an effort, ‘I am okay.’

‘No, not because of you,’ Kang said, ‘I feel my leg muscle aching.’

‘Do you? You must have strained yourself.’

‘Yes, I believe so. Well, not a big deal, we all feel sore from time to time, depending on the intensity of training.’

By this time, Bing had already sat up. ‘Then we can go for a drink this evening?’

Kang smiled, like a morning sun, ‘Yes, you deserve it, don’t you?’

A sort of sudden joy, strange and incredible under the circumstances, affected Bing’s mood, as quickly as those tears had set upon him a while earlier.

He nearly jumped out of his bed, for the first time in the day feeling the rattle in his stomach, realizing he had not taken any food or water since the day broke.

After doing his washing, they went out to the restaurant they used to go in Sichuan Bei Road, where Bing was able to allay much of the malicious energy incited by the incident the evening before. Bing simply reported that Vivian was seen walking with another guy, and talked in a light-hearted, careless air, supported and disguised by three bottles of beer.
And from that day onwards, Vivian seemed to have become a stranger, a new composition associated with certain dirt and disgust in his mind. Every time he saw her hopping about in the classroom or in the playground, and when his old love threatened to revisit and touch him, the horrific image of her doing it with the man would emerge in time to suppress it. Largely he had been successful, and as time went on, she had withered dead in his heart, or, if not dead completely, was buried deep in the ashes of his perished love. She was neither a friend nor a fiend, no longer a person to whom he should spare his attention or shed his emotion. She was nobody but one who happened to sit in the same class, listening to the same set of droning teachers. No matter how ostentatiously she flourished her hair and gestures, was no longer his concern.
When the new students’ welcoming party was held again in September 1990, she asked him to perform his guitar. He performed for the sake of performance, nothing to do with her, no emotion was expended for her like before; he would have done it all the same should the request have been raised by any other classmates.   

Besides his guitar playing and book reading, he was now also able to spend more time with Kang, who had to cancel his training more often because of his sore muscles, even if, twice or more a week, Kang would go out with his girlfriend.
Lat one afternoon, finding Kang in the room, Bing asked, ‘You’re not going to training again?’

‘Not today, I may need a long period of rest, to recover the normal functioning of my legs.’

‘What does your trainer say?’

‘He thinks the same; I may have worked too hard.’

So for a couple of weeks, Kang had stopped his training, but the pain persisted, so he went to the medical centre of the university, and he was advised to see a specialist in a hospital.

Becoming a bit serious, on the next Saturday, Bing accompanied him to Shanghai First People’s Hospital. A number of checks were done, including the X-rays and other things they had never even thought of before. After he was finished, the doctor asked Kang to come back for the results the following weekend.

But they didn’t wait until the weekend.  Kang got a call from the hospital only the next day, the Sunday, asked him go to hospital immediately. They went.

Bing was waiting worryingly outside on the bench. When Kang finally came out from the door, he sprang up towards him. ‘How is it?’

Kang didn’t reply not even look at him; he merely laid his hand on Bing’s shoulder as if he couldn’t stand by himself.  

Alarmed by the Kang’s paper-like face, by his scary silence and obliviousness, Bing shook him, lightly lest he could just fall over, ‘Kang, Kang, why, what is the matter!’

But Kang’s dull, unseeing eyes still looking ahead, afforded him no relief of urgency. It was not until they went out of the crowded corridor, leaning against the wall, that Kang, who had now come back to a quarter of himself, told him he had got cancer.     

It was bone cancer, in late stage, even the amputation of his leg wouldn’t save him, he said.

The world seemed to Bing suddenly different, no sound, no sense, mechanical and darkening.

As soon as they came back to school, Kang asked Bing to call Xiaodan, telling her that he wanted to talk to her. Bing went to find her, and on their way back to their room didn’t tell her of the real cause of the urgent visit. She went in, while the other roommates who by this time already knew of the shocking news came out of the room.

Some time later, she came out, in tears.

Bing entered the room, and Kang said, ‘I told her that was the last time she should see me.’   

So it was not muscle pain, it was the bone around his knee of his left leg, about where Kang had started feeling pain half a year before. The doctor asked him to spend his time in hospital, to be better treated with various measures, to relieve his pain that was supposed to get worse and worse as days passed.

The shock of the calamity was passed on to the teachers, other classmates, and his parents. A donation was initiated on the campus. Bing called his father for one thousand, explaining the purpose, ‘Borrow the money wherever from...’  

Two days later, Kang moved into the hospital, and the day after, his father arrived in Shanghai to stay with him.
When his father, kneeling at the bedstead, held Kang and cried as a broken man, Bing went and hold them both.  

One day, Bing said to him, ‘Kang, where do you want to see the most? I will try to make it, and accompany you.’

Kang smiled softly, ‘Thank you, Bing, but I just want to go home.’

‘Then, I will accompany you home.’

Within six weeks, Kang had lost much of his hair and weight, supported by the ghastly-looking oxygen hose. According to the doctor’s estimate, he had two or three months more to live. He expressed his wish to go home, to save the trips of his mother and brothers and sister. So it was decided to transfer him to the hospital of his county in Heilongjiang province, sooner rather than later.

A farewell date was set for his classmates and his teachers and his basketball team members and his other friends and fellows to see him for the last time. The classmates all arrived in the morning, waiting outside the hospital, and went into the ward in three smaller groups, one after another.

Bing went in the second group, half numbed after seeing the tears and sobbing, especially of the girls in the first group. Kang, on the bed, was propped up by a pile of pillows. He wore a cap on his head, his face still had a square structure, but his brows and cheekbones were so much more prominent. Smiling, and, with his thin long fingers, he shook each hand reached over to him, calling the name of its owner, who, in their emotion, could mumble no words but his name, and now and again Kang had to pause to inhale the oxygen from the hose dangling beside him.

At Bing’s turn, Kang lost his smile, and, looking at Bing for a long second, his large eyes started brimming with tears, and his breath grew heavier, panting, and wheezing.

Kang’s hand was thin and bony, like a twig.

‘Kang…’ Bing’s voice was broken, he stooped and bent over, embracing Kang’s head on his chest…

At last, with a kiss on Kang’s forehead, and a pressure in his shaky hand, and a steady look into his large eyes, he released him to the next in the queue.

Later that day, when the others had left, he told Kang and his father that he would accompany them to their home. At first they didn’t agree, saying he should attend his classes, but later they were persuaded to accept his offer.

However, the next day, the doctor suggested they take an airplane, instead of the lengthy train trip they had planned. So, due to the much higher cost – more than 300 Yuan one way, Bing didn’t insist on his entreaty.

In his wheelchair, in the airport, during his last hours in Shanghai, Kang didn’t appear as sad as he had been in the hospital. Instead, he smiled more often. Bing knew he was thinking of his home, where his mother and brothers and sister, whom he had not seen during the ast three years, were waiting for him.  

The last look, the last turn of Kang’s head towards him, while standing at the gate seeing them off, was eternal.     

Bing stayed in the toilet and cried silently.




-- End of Chapter 34 ---