Only when the women pulled her away were her hoarse sobs finally released. She had perfectly good reasons for crying, of course: for her mother and brother (who'd just passed away, who'd died in unfortunate circumstances), that there was no way she could seek redress on her own (even her little brother couldn't help her out). In my opinion, though, her sobs were perhaps even more than that, were a kind of secret reciprocation directed toward me. Twenty years, it had been, twenty years: she must have heard my sorrow on the mountainside twenty years ago, and now the tears were fighting their way unstoppably out of her eyes, trying to repay a debt of tears that could never be spoken of out loud.

The autumn grasses that filled the mountainside were a testimony to this debt of tears. They swayed in the wind, nodding in waves toward the summit. Maybe they'd silently soaked up too many human sobs, maybe that was why they'd declined into shrunken, withered reeds.

All these years later, I revisited what had formerly been the war-preparation cave. The world war had never been fought in the end. The one we'd dug had been converted into a storage cellar for potato seeds; because it was damp, the cave walls had grown green moss and the smell of moldering sweet potatoes floated from the mouth of the cave. But circular smoke stains lingered, in a few hollows where we'd placed the oil lamp.

There was another cave in the lower village, which had also been dug at about the same time by other people. The cave mouth was now blocked up by two scruffy wooden planks, with a mess of rice stalks, a few multicolored, now-discarded cigarette packets, and a pair of tattered shoes dropped behind them-as if someone was still living there.

*Separated-Pot Brothers

: "Ah-ha, an honored guest, come sit for a while in the cave."

His face was familiar, but I couldn't quite remember who he was.

"Comrade Han, how's your health?"

"Good."

"How's work?"

"Good."

"How's study?"

"Good, quite good."

"How are your venerable elders?"

"Not bad."

"Are your honorable sons and daughters obedient?"

"I only have one daughter, but thank you for your concern."

"Eh," he inclined his head, "is industrial production in the cities good?"

"Of course…"

"Is the flow of commerce in the cities also…"

Fearing my conversation partner was about to inquire into every urban profession and trade, I hurriedly cut into this parallel sentence exchange: "I'm sorry, you are…?"

"Parted so recently, and you don't recognize me?" He smiled at me. All this happened while I was visiting the air-raid shelter and a middleaged man popped up by my side.

"I can't quite…"

"You are forgetful, good sir."

"It's not that surprising, I left here almost twenty years ago."

"Really? Twenty years? Now that's surprising! Can it really be that one day in the cave is a thousand years in the outside world? Tsk tsk." As he spoke, he shook his head in deepest, unfathomable puzzlement.

A distant voice, accompanied by a laugh, shouted: "That's Ma Ming!"

"Yes, my unworthy surname is Ma, informal name Ming."

"You're Ma Ming? The one from the House of Immortals…"

"Ashamed, bitterly ashamed."

Only now did I begin to remember, to remember how I'd gone to his house to paint quotations by Chairman Mao; I also noticed that a drip was hanging off the tip of his nose, as if on the point of falling, but-not falling. Each wrinkle on his face contained a rich seam of grime, but he didn't in fact look aged in the slightest. His face ruddy, his voice booming, he still looked exactly as he had before, dressed in a dirty, greasy, cotton jacket, with both hands resting inside his sleeves. The only change was that he seemed to have an extra badge from some county teachers' training college pinned to his chest, picked up from who knew where.

"You're still living in… the House of Immortals?"

"It has been my good fortune, my good fortune, to move to a new abode." He smiled, a segment of lotus root caked with mud in his hand, and gestured toward the interior of the air-raid shelter.

"You live in a place as damp as this?" I was astonished.

"You just don't understand. Men evolved from monkeys, monkeys evolved from fish, fish swim fearlessly in the sea all year long, so why on earth should they fear damp after they've turned into men?"

"You don't get ill?"

"I'm ashamed to say, in this lifetime of mine, I've eaten all sorts of delicious things but never known the taste of medicine." Just as he was saying this, a woman rushed over, saying a big pumpkin had disappeared from her family's garden and wanting to know whether Ma Ming had picked it. Ma Ming immediately began to glower: "Why don't you ask me whether I'm a murderer, too, while you're at it?" Seeing the woman's blank stare, he pressed his advantage with another growl: "Why don't you ask me whether I murdered Chairman Mao?" As a segue, he spat on the ground, forgetting all about me, his guest, and stalked off.

A few kids giggling somewhere off in the distance fled in terror after one sideways glance from him.

Off he went, spitting with anger. The last time I saw him was as I was leaving Maqiao. I spotted him standing on the mountain, as usual, leaning on a walking stick, a lone, independent figure on the hillside behind the upper village, looking far off into the vast, hazy, open fields that stretched out before him as the pink light of dawn floated over the mountain valleys. He looked to be in a complete trance. I also heard him hum a strange sort of intonation, like a moan pressed out of his gut, which turned out to be a well-known tune from television:

Where did you come from? My friend, It's as if a butterfly has flown to my window. I don't know how many days it'll stay, We've been apart too long, too long…

I didn't dare call out to him, as it didn't feel right disrupting the aesthetic mood evoked by his butterfly.

It was only later that I found out those few words I'd got out of Ma Ming were quite the most courteous reception I could have hoped for. For a good few years lately, he'd severed all relations with the villagers and hadn't had a friendly look, let alone word, for anyone. Every day, footloose and fancy-free, he wandered through the mountains and surveyed the rivers, viewing the human world with a coldly indifferent eye. Once, a child fell into the pond unnoticed by anyone else in the village but him, as he stood on the hillside. He saved the child but refused even to contemplate the thanks of the child's mother, threw all the cured pork she sent to his door into the dung pit: "Don't pollute my mouth," he'd! said. He'd rather eat ants and earthworms than eat the coarse food of coarse people, than accept favors from the villagers.

By then, he'd moved out of the House of Immortals. Maqiao's oldest residence had collapsed and Zhihuang got a few people together to rip out the foundations. A few fired bricks were still usable, so the villagers built a wayside pavilion and a small house for him. Hands in his sleeves, he went to have a look, but instead of moving into the new house uttered an uncompromising declaration of war. He chose instead to crawl into the air-raid shelter.

He didn't do that much sleeping in the cave; far more often he'd sleep in the wild, on the mountains, using the wind for a pillow, the dew for a bed. Someone once asked him if he was afraid of being eaten by something wild while asleep on the mountain. Being eaten-what was there to be afraid of in that? he asked. In his lifetime he'd eaten a good many wild things, so it was only fair that he should be eaten back by something wild in return.