Breaking from his normal schedule, instead of crossing the river at the floodplain, for reasons he could not explain he decided to go around it. He walked slowly, his legs feeling unusually heavy. After a while he stopped. The sunset blazed across the sky and turned his broad back bright red. He shuddered in the sun’s dying rays and then took off running back toward the floodplain as fast as he could, muttering things no one could understand. His hair was swept back, he lurched from side to side, and his arms flailed out from his body. Deep imprints in the ground were created with each flying step. Then he stopped abruptly, for there in the densest part of the willow grove stood Xiaokui, her hair tied with a red kerchief.
Baopu stood motionless for a moment before walking slowly toward her. When he reached her he saw she was crying. She said she’d thought he was walking away from her.
As they crouched down in the grove, her tears were still flowing. Baopu nervously lit a cigarette; Xiaokui took it out of his mouth and threw it away. Then she laid her head against his chest. He put his arms around her and kissed her hair. She looked up at him and he wiped away her tears with his callused hand; then she lowered her head again. He kissed her, and kissed her again. “Xiaokui,” he said, shaking his head, “I don’t understand you.”
She nodded. “I don’t understand myself,” she said, “so of course you can’t. You sit there on a stool with that ladle in your hand, never saying a word. You look like a stone statue, but with energy bursting to get out. I have to admit I’m scared of anyone who won’t talk, but I also know that sooner or later I’ll be yours.”
Baopu lifted up her face and looked intently into her flashing eyes. He shook his head. “I’m part of the Sui clan,” he said. “Why…would you want to be mine?”
She just nodded. Neither of them spoke as they leaned against one another until the sun had disappeared below the horizon. Then they stood up and began to walk. When it was time to go their separate ways, Baopu said, “You and I are people who have little to say.” Xiaokui rubbed his rough, callused hand and raised it to her nose to smell it.
Baopu had trouble sleeping after Xiaokui had smelled his hand, he realized. He tossed and turned, and when he finally fell asleep someone came up and lifted up his hand. He held out both hands for her, his heart filled with happiness. She walked out of the room, and he followed. Moonbeams created a haze in the air. She was walking in front of him, but when he blinked she was gone. Then she leaped out from behind, her body as light as a bundle of grain stalks. Oh, it was Guigui. “Guigui!” he shouted “Guigui!…” He reached out, but pristine, pale moonbeams were all he touched.
He didn’t sleep that night, but that did not keep him from going to the mill the next day, where only her cricket cage remained; Xiaokui did not show up to carry off buckets. He fed the crickets some melon flowers. When he went over to the processing room, he saw that she was washing the noodles, her arms red from being submerged in water. He did not call out to her, since Li Zhaolu was sitting above her banging the metal strainer, chanting as he did: “Hang-ya! Hang-ya!” The people below said, “He sure knows how to bang that!” Baopu looked up at the coarse old man, who had his eyes fixed on Xiaokui on the floor below. Without a word, Baopu walked back to his mill, where the stone creaked as it made one slow revolution after another and the ox’s head swayed in concert with the sound.
Baopu forgot what it was like to enjoy a good night’s sleep. How had he gotten through the past twenty years? he wondered. He regularly stumbled into Zhao Family Lane and lay sprawled beneath Xiaokui’s rear window, where no one could see him. She had told him she was to be married to Li Zhaolu, and there was nothing she could do about that, since the decision was made when Fourth Master nodded his approval. Baopu lost hope. That nod of the head had sealed the matter. So he abandoned his fantasies and went back to sitting quietly on his stool in the mill. And yet, desire burned in his heart, tormenting him. When a splitting headache set in, he wrapped his head with a piece of cloth, which lessened the pain at least a little. This reminded him of when the old ship was excavated, since his uncle had worn a headband that day, and he now realized that the old man too had likely been suffering from a headache; he had taken the loss of his boat badly and had been in low spirits ever since.
Not long after Baopu started wearing a headband, Xiaokui married Li Zhaolu. Baopu collapsed when he heard the news and lay numb in his room. Then news reached town that Li Zhaolu had fled to the northeast and slipped into one of the cities there, where he planned to make his fortune and then send for Xiaokui. Sure enough, there was no trace of Zhaolu in town, and Xiaokui had moved back into the family home on Zhao Family Lane.
One stormy night, as thunder rumbled, lightning struck a tree near the old mill. Everyone in town heard the fearsome noise. Wakened by the thunder, Baopu could not go back to sleep and suffered the rest of the night from a headache so bad he had to put the headband back on. As the rain fell outside he imagined that he heard Guigui calling him from far away. So he threw his coat over his shoulders and ran outside, racing across the muddy ground and through the misty rain with no idea where he was going. But when he wiped the water from his face and out of his eyes, he found he was standing beneath Xiaokui’s window. His blood surged. He banged on the window. She was leaning against the sill, weeping, but refused to open the window. Baopu felt the blood rush to his head, turning his cheeks feverish; with a pop, the headband snapped in two, like a broken lute string. He drove his fist through the window.
Suddenly feeling cold, he held her in his arms and felt her heat burning into his chest. Unable to stop shaking or breathing hard, she held her arms crossed in front of her. When he pulled her arms away, she rubbed his rough, callused hands. She was breathing hard in the darkness, almost choking. “Ah, ah,” she said, over and over. Baopu loosened her long hair and removed the little clothing she was wearing. As if talking to himself, he said, “This is how it is. I can’t help myself. I’ve been like this every day. Lightning split something in two. Are you scared that you can’t see anything? Pitiful people, like this, like this. The cricket cage in the mill was blown brittle by the wind. It crumbled when I touched it. A poor, pitiful man. What can I do? You think I’m a terrible person. Like this, like this. Your hands, oh, oh, I’ve got stubble all over my face. I’m so stupid, like a stone. And you, and you. More thunder, why doesn’t lightning strike me dead! All right, I’ll stop talking like that. But you, your hands. What do we do? You, little Xiaokui, my little Xiaokui…” She kept kissing him, and he stopped talking. When lightning lit up the sky, Baopu saw she was sweating. “All I can think of is taking you back to my room, where we would seal up the door and never go out again. The millstone can turn on its own. And that’s how we’d be, in our own home.” Xiaokui did not say a word, it seemed; her eyes reminded him of the night beneath the willow tree that year, and he recalled what she’d said then: “Sooner or later I’ll be yours.” And he had whispered to her: “That’s good.”
For several days after the thunderstorm, Baopu slept through the night. He was also moved to go to his brother’s and his sister’s rooms in order to share his happiness with them. Hanzhang always looked healthy and happy, while Jiansu was in a permanently foul mood. As the circles around his eyes grew darker, he told his brother he’d been spurned, which didn’t surprise Baopu, who just sighed. Apparently, fate had dictated that this generation of the Sui clan could fall in love but that marriage was beyond their reach.
Several days later Li Zhaolu returned from the northeast. After a year of trying to make a living far from home, his skin had taken on a gray pallor and his cheekbones were more prominent. He said he planned to go back, and he’d only returned home to start a family. So he spent a month in Wali, after which he said, “That’ll do it,” and headed back to the northeast. This time he did not return. News of his death arrived six months later. He had been buried in a coal mine cave-in. His widow, Xiaokui, was no longer willing to step foot beyond Zhao Family Lane. Then one day Baopu spotted a woman in mourning apparel. Xiaokui.
Xiaokui gave birth to little Leilei. Meanwhile, Baopu’s health deteriorated,