Free The Seventh Day by Yu Hua Page B

expression, and that look of distress, rather than passing quickly, settled on his face for some time. His emotions were in turmoil, for he was now deeply in love with the girl, while loving me, of course, too. These were two different kinds of love, and he needed to choose one and abandon the other.
    Actually, the young woman wasn’t really rejecting me out of hand—she was simply being pragmatic. She was twenty-eight, which in those days counted as very late to be single, and it meant she didn’t have many choices of men. In her eyes my father was strong in all departments—his only drawback was that he had adopted a foundling. She pictured how in the future they would have children of their own, and it seemed to her that fitting me into the family would be an awkward proposition. So that’s why she said what she did: if they didn’t have me to worry about, things would go more smoothly. She wasn’t wrong to think that way: they might well have more than two children, and to have a foundling to care for too would impose a heavy burden on a couple with a limited income. Even so, she still accepted my existence—she just felt that my father should have left me with an orphanage at the outset. She was just saying.
    My father tended to have a one-track mind, and if an idea that he was set on found obstacles in its way, he would be unable to think of an alternative. And so the idea got fixed in his head that she would never go along with a package deal. Perhaps he was right, for even if she could have brought herself to accept me, in the long run I would have been a flash point for conflict and strife. My father was like a wet towel dripping with emotions: she and I had seized opposite ends of the towel and were wringing it with all our might, and his heart was in torment.
    I had no inkling of his struggle and no awareness that now, when my father looked at me, it was with pity and not with joy. If anything, during these days he seemed to be all the more devoted to me. Although I was now steady on my feet, my father would carry me in his arms as though I couldn’t walk properly, and he would put his face close to mine. Always a bit of a penny-pincher, now every day he would buy me two candies, one of which he would slip into my mouth, the other of which he would pop into one of my pockets.
    Much as he found it difficult to part from me emotionally, in his mind he was steadily moving in a different direction. Now twenty-five, one way or another my father needed a woman in his life. He loved me, but he needed a woman’s love even more. After much agonizing, he chose her and abandoned me.
    Early one morning I woke up to find my father sitting on the bed. He leaned over and said softly, “Yang Fei, let’s go on a train ride.”
    Although I had lived four years next to a busy railroad line, I had never once taken a train. I stuck my nose against the windowpane: as the train began to move and I saw the people on the platform quickly receding, I gave a wail of alarm. Then I saw houses and streets retreating rapidly, and fields and ponds as well, but I noticed the farther away things were, the more slowly they retreated.
    “Why is it like that?” I asked my father.
    “I don’t know,” he said morosely.
    At noon that day we disembarked in a small town and lunched on noodles in a little place opposite the station, my father ordering a bowl of noodles with shredded pork for me and a bowl of plain noodles for himself. I couldn’t finish such a big bowl and my father ate the leftovers. Then he had me sit while he asked directions to the orphanage. The first three people he talked to said they weren’t sure; the fourth thought for a moment and then told him where to find it.
    He carried me a long way, until we arrived at a stone-slab bridge over a dry riverbed. He heard children singing in a building on the opposite bank and assumed it was the orphanage (it was actually a kindergarten). Clasped in his arms, I heard the