It made me think of how our forefathers had described hell.

There was no difference between day and night down here, no difference between summer and winter, no recollection even of the outside world far, far away. Only accidental collisions with another sweat-streamed face startled you awake: you discovered you still existed, you were still a person, an actual person with forename and surname, for example, with a gender. For the first few days, after we'd just started, Fangying and I still managed to find a few things to talk about. But after a few startled collisions, she said no more; the most I'd get out of her was a grunted "uh." I later discovered her "uh's" covered an enormous spectrum of tones and degrees of vehemence, could express doubt, assent, even anxiety or refusal. "Uh" represented the absolute concentration of her language, an endlessly various piece of rhetoric, an inexhaustible sea of meaning.

I also noticed that she'd begun to take care to avoid collisions, that the sounds of her panting were often a long way from where I was. But every time we got off work, she'd quietly pick up clothes I'd forgotten in the cave and stuff them into my hands at an appropriate moment. When eating, she'd add two or three sweet potatoes to my bowl, while her bowl remained almost empty. And finally, as I was kneeling on the ground, sweating away, every tendon straining, I'd feel a billow of coolness on my back-a towel would mop my glistening spine.

"Leave it…" The sweat had got up my nose, stopped me finishing my sentence.

The towel lightly mopped my face.

"I don't need…"

I ducked my face away, tried to block the towel. But in the darkness, my hand wouldn't follow orders and missed the towel, ended up grabbing- after a couple of fumbles mid-air-a hand. It was only a long time after the event itself that I remembered this hand was small and soft. No, I should correct that: memories like this are imaginings, conjectures after the event. In reality, when you reach the point when physical strength is totally used up, the point when your panting is overdrawn on future panting, gender no longer exists. Chance touches are not only no longer startling: you lose all sense of touch whatsoever. Grabbing a woman's hand becomes no different from grabbing a handful of mud. Staggering, swaying, I might have brushed against her shoulder, might even have stroked her back, there might have been other might-have-beens, and others besides, but I've no memory left of this, no solid proof.

I believe that, at this moment, she too had lost her sense of touch, of shyness and reserve, that all emotional abstraction had been puffed and panted out. This is the first and only time in my life so far that I've experienced de-gendering like this.

Afterwards, as I gradually recovered my energy, she recovered her gender and retreated far, far away.

Later still, she got married. Her parents valued sons over daughters and only let her finish primary school before sending her out to earn work points in the village; once they'd found a family that could afford to eat white rice they sent her packing. The day she was sent off to be married, dressed in a new pink jacket and a pair of fairly up-to-the-minute white tennis shoes, she stood there, thronged by a crowd of twittering girls. I don't know why, but she never cast a glance at me. She would certainly have heard my voice, certainly have known I was there, but for some unknown reason, she'd talk to anybody, meet anybody's eyes-but never took a glance at me. There was nothing between her and me, nothing secret. Apart from that time digging in the cave, there'd been no other contact between us to mention. There was nothing special to be said, beyond my later imaginings and conjectures that I'd felt that hand of hers, beyond her having had the opportunity to witness my greatest sufferings. No other woman in the world would ever be so close to me in the state I'd been in then, would see me lying there like a dog, dressed in a pair of shorts and nothing else, sometimes kneeling, sometimes on my side, my whole body bathed in mud and sweat, struggling, panting underground in a darkness utterly bereft of daylight, with only the eyes in my head to prove I was human, covered with dust and smoke particles snorted around my nostrils. She'd seen a look in my eyes that would return only in death, heard groans and pants I'd make again only on the point of death, smelled my body at its most intolerable-smelling. That was all.

Of course, she'd also heard my breathless sobs. Suffering furious abuse from Benyi, we'd wanted to get the cave dug to keep a step ahead of all the bombs of the imperialists, revisionists, and counterrevolutionaries. During that time, I must've hacked five or six pickaxes to pieces. Once, when I lost my concentration, the pickaxe slipped out of my grasp and dug into my own foot-it hurt so much I burst into tears.

She cried, too. As her hands flew to help me wrap the wound, a drop of cool water fell onto the back of my foot. It wasn't a drop of sweat, I guessed: it was a tear.

We'd hit a seam of the most rock-hard purple-teeth soil. It was no fault of hers she couldn't help me much. Neither was it any fault of hers she couldn't avoid seeing my pitiful, utterly humiliated condition. And neither, moreover, was it any fault of hers that she had no way of returning this, this secret between us, to me, and was forced to carry it off with her, far away.

Since points of extremity in a human lifetime are very rare, this secret took on correspondingly vast proportions, became a jewel of priceless value embedded in her memory. Maybe Fangying had realized this early on and it had produced in her a sense of horror at the thought of an unpaid loan or of having guzzled down something belonging to someone else, and maybe that was why she didn't dare glance at me when she left.

"Looks like rain, you'd better take an umbrella with you," someone said to her.

She nodded her head and pronounced an emphatic "uh."

I'd caught it: her "uh" spread its wings, flew over the crowd, over the heads of children grabbing at candied fruits, and straight into my ears- it wasn't a reply to the comment about the umbrella, of course: it was an expression of farewell, of well-wishing.

I didn't stick around till she set off, I didn't watch her three brothers haul her trousseau onto their shoulders and a new pot onto their backs, didn't watch those few kids accompany her in rowdy pursuit as she started off on her long journey. I went to the hillside behind the mountain, sat down, listened to the whispering of the wind among the leaves, and gazed at the autumn leaves filling the mountains, watching and waiting for me. The sound of the flute playing to the departing bride suddenly rose up so loud that all the autumn grasses around started to tremble and sway, before they were drowned out of view by the tears in my eyes. I had lots of reasons to cry, of course. I was crying that my family had forgotten me (I hadn't even gotten a letter from them on my birthday), I was crying about a friend's negligence at a critical time for me (this friend, off to enjoy himself in town, had carelessly lost an urgent letter I'd nagged him about again and again, an urgent letter that concerned my future job prospects). And, of course, I was also crying about this bride, a bride who bore no relation to me whatsoever, who never could bear any relation to me, who'd been banished by the sound of the flute, her pink jacket lost to a distant and unknown family, taking those worthless "uh's" of hers away from me forever.

When I next saw her again, many years later, she was rather thinner and her face had taken on the ashen flatness of middle age. If someone standing next to me hadn't introduced us, I'd have had great difficulty making out the lines of her face as it had been all those years back. She stared momentarily, a dim flicker of recognition in her eyes, before her gaze swiftly flitted from my face. Her mind was on other things. A rural cadre who'd come to the village the same time I had was sorting out the civil dispute between her and Yanwu's family, sorting out her mother's and her younger brother's funerals, and criticizing her for running back to her parents' home to cry grievances for her brother by standing his body (see the entry for "Standing the Body"). "What more's there to say? Why won't you let the dead rest, why d'you want to make them stand! When someone's dead, doesn't matter how much fuss you make, it won't bring them back to life, doesn't matter whether you're right or wrong, no sense in making a fuss!" The cadre spoke in tones of such vexed admonition that even her brothers nodded in agreement; only she fell with a thump to her knees and, before the rural cadre had worked out what she was doing, bashed out a whole series of resonant kowtows. Two women nearby hurried forward to pull her up, tugging and yanking at her, but her face, glistening, awash with tears, kept bobbing and struggling between upright and kneeling positions as complaints continued to stream from her mouth.