Border Town by Shen CongWen

Author:Shen CongWen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2009-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A man arrived at Green Creek Hill bearing gifts. Dockmaster Shunshun had indeed asked a matchmaker to go to the ferry to seek matrimonial relations for his first son. Flustered, the old ferryman brought him across the creek and into the house. Cuicui, who was shelling peas outside by the door, at first paid the guest little attention. But when she heard the matchmaker say, “Congratulations, congratulations,” at the door, she began to worry. Unwilling to squat by the front door any longer, she pretended to be shooing away the chickens in the vegetable garden. Flailing a bamboo whistling pole in the air, she softly scolded them as she ran toward the white pagoda in back.

The visitor made small talk. When they got around to the matter at hand, namely Shunshun’s initiative, the old ferryman didn’t know how to respond. He could only rub his big, calloused hands together, as if he couldn’t believe it. The expression on his face seemed to say: “Fine, this is wonderful,” yet the old man said not a word in reply.

When the visitor finished, he asked Grandpa what he thought about it. The old ferryman smiled and nodded: “So No. 1 wants to make the chariot’s move, that’s just fine. But I must ask Cuicui, to get her reaction.” After he had seen off the visitor, Grandpa stood in the prow of the boat and called Cuicui down to the river for a talk.

Bringing a pan of peas down with her to the stream, Cuicui boarded the boat and asked her grandpa, with all the charm she could muster, “Grandfather, what is it?” Grandpa smiled in silence. Tilting his hoary white head, he looked at Cuicui for a long time. Cuicui sat down in the boat, a little taken aback. She bent over to continue shelling her peas when she heard the call of a yellow finch from the bamboo grove. Cuicui thought: “The days are growing longer, and Grandfather is taking longer to get his words out, too.” Her heart was gently pounding.

After another pause, Grandpa said: “Cuicui—Cuicui—do you know what that visit was all about?”

Cuicui answered, “No, I don’t.” But her face and neck flushed crimson.

Observing all this, Grandpa sensed Cuicui’s anxiety and looked up far away across the sky. In the mist he saw Cuicui’s mother as she was fifteen years earlier, and his heart melted. He said, under his breath, “Every boat needs a berth, and every sparrow needs a nest.” He began to think about the unhappy fate of Cuicui’s mother. His heart ached and he smiled with difficulty.

And Cuicui—Cuicui was thinking about so many things, amid the calls of the finches and cuckoo birds in the mountains and the chops of lumbermen felling bamboos in the valleys. Stories of tigers eating people, and the mountain songs people sang to belittle and make fun of each other, the square pit in which papermakers mixed their pulp, the molten iron that flowed out of a foundry smelting furnace—she felt compelled to recollect everything her ears had heard and her eyes had seen.

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