Yahui emerged from the auditorium to fetch her marriage certificate. She wanted to hear the final portion of “My Beloved Deskmate” before going to the religion building, so she lingered in the entranceway for a while. By this point, all the seats in the auditorium were filled, and in addition to students from the religion classes there were also first- and second-year students from the music academy in attendance. Because there were no empty seats, new arrivals stood either in the back row or in the hallway. The air conditioner was blowing hot air, which, combined with the music, made the audience feel as though they were in a tropical rain forest. Meanwhile, in the June evening outside the auditorium, she could hear the people singing mournfully on and below the stage,
Who encountered the you who is very sentimental?
Who comforts the you who likes to cry?
Who saw me write you a letter?
And who threw the letter into the wind?
…
The remaining lyrics dropped syllable by syllable, like autumn rain dripping onto Yahui’s body. There was a bone-piercing comfort and chill, which made Yahui’s entire being plummet into the depths of the elegy and melt into the boundary between life and death. At this moment, she was distracted by the sound of someone approaching her. The person approaching was Tian Dongqing. He walked quickly, with his head turned, and when he reached Yahui he abruptly came to a stop.
Ordinarily, he would have asked, “Has the performance been going on for very long?” or explained why he was late. However, when he saw her this time, he didn’t say either of these things, and instead he urgently declared: “Today I went to the Miyun cemetery to visit Wang Changping’s tomb. Although he and I didn’t belong to the same faith, we were still classmates.”
Surprised, Yahui stood on the crescent-shaped steps outside the building entrance. Both the overhead lights and Yahui’s face were milky white, and the broken shadows of pagoda trees between nearby buildings covered Tian Dongqing’s face such that Yahui couldn’t even make out his expression when he was speaking. She could only hear his voice, which sounded as though it were traveling through a wall. If it weren’t for the fact that Tian Dongqing was standing directly in front of her, Yahui wouldn’t have known that the voice she was hearing was coming from his mouth.
“Do you know what is inscribed on Wang Changping’s tombstone?” Tian Dongqing said in a very soft and level voice. “The inscription contains six characters: I am the disciple Wang Changping!”
Imam Tian enunciated the phrase I am the disciple Wang Changping as heavily and brightly as though he were excavating gold nuggets, then added in a strange voice, “Did you know? I hear that that person who almost became a deity of deities—he was actually Director Gong’s foster father! I hear that last month he almost became the director of the National Religion Association, but the deities subsequently appeared and didn’t permit the directorship to be changed. Consequently, the former director remains the director.”
Yahui and Tian Dongqing both stood there silent and motionless. They gazed at one another, as though having just noticed something mysterious but not particularly extraordinary. They stood there as though separated by a river, and given that they were unable to hear one another, all they could do was let their gazes rest on each other’s faces. The sound of song and music coming from the auditorium emerged through a crack in the door, and after drifting into the late-June night, it condensed into starlike lights overhead. Who encountered the you who is very sentimental? Who braided your long hair? Who sewed your wedding gown? … Even after the final guitar notes had faded away, the singer and the disciples in front of the stage continued to vocalize, “Lalalalala … lalalalala.”
For some reason, Yahui suddenly started sobbing, as though an inexplicable and irrepressible sorrow were welling up in her breast. Tears streamed down her face like rain, and she wanted to turn and leave. However, when Tian Dongqing saw that she was about to depart, he stopped her and said, “Tell me, isn’t it true that the center was promoted to an institute only after it sent off half of the money donated by the religious masters—combined with the money that Pastor Wang bequeathed the center? You know, I hear that now that he is institute director, Director Gong will also be appointed to the National Religious Affairs Bureau. I am standing before you and requesting: If he is in fact appointed and either you or Mingzheng end up becoming his secretary, could you please ask him to relax the regulations pertaining to us Muslims?” As Tian Dongqing said this, he gazed at Yahui, like a child begging his mother for something. Tian Dongqing saw that Yahui seemed confused and befuddled, as though someone had mistaken her for someone else. In the lamplight, her face appeared flushed and panicked. Therefore, he smiled and said, “Did they announce the exam scores at the graduation ceremony? Did I have the highest scores? I told Zhisu I would receive the highest scores, and that way I’d be able to earn a little extra money to help restore the mosque where she is based.”
Yahui shook her head and said that they had not yet announced the scores, whereupon Imam Tian left and continued toward the auditorium.
After staring blankly for a while, Yahui continued toward the religion building. Because she had been delayed while speaking to Tian Dongqing, she increased her pace, to the point that soon she was half walking and half running. However, even as she was rushing away, she turned and shouted, “Imam Tian, Brother Tian, you still haven’t come to see my new apartment.” She continued walking away, then started running. To get back to the dormitory and retrieve her marriage certificate from under her pillow as quickly as possible, she didn’t take the same route she had followed on her way in, but instead she selected a path that cut between several buildings on the way to the religion building. The evergreens next to the path kept reaching out to grasp her arms and legs. From a poplar behind the evergreens, wave after wave of evening cicada cries rained down onto her head. The next event was the awards ceremony. It was reported that the total purse was more than eight million yuan, of which two million had been allotted for the student with the highest average score out of the five religion classes. There were also awards for the winning teams in tug-of-war, ping-pong, and badminton, for those who were most active in organizing athletic events for each religion, and for the “Most Popular Instructor,” which was decided every year by votes from disciples and students, the Religious Harmony academic-paper award, and so forth and so on. After the prize ceremony, it would be time for Yahui and Mingzheng to go on stage for their “wedding.” Now that the religious training center had become a religion institute and Director Gong had become an institute director, perhaps he would indeed be appointed to serve as director of the National Religious Affairs Bureau, where he would oversee the country’s religious affairs, like Tian Dongqing had said. Who knows? Although these developments would ultimately be arranged by the organization and deities, they still filled Yahui with a sense of horror and dread.
Half walking and half running, Yahui arrived at the entrance to the religion building, where she used the weight of her body to push open the door. There was no one in the lobby when she arrived, only several bags of trash. In one partially open bag, she could see various items that students had thrown out—including old clothes, winter scarves, tattered shoes, and a monk’s dirty robe and an imam’s ripped skullcap. Next to that bag of old clothing, there were several bundles of old books, newspapers, and magazines that the cleaners had tied together. The newspapers were copies of The People’s Daily, Guangming Daily, and the National Religion Association’s Chinese Religion Daily, of which the center had purchased subscriptions for each floor of the religion building. In addition to the magazines, which included political journals, literature journals, and religion journals such as Religion Study and New Faith Stories, there were also three bundles of books. Yahui knew that these were instructional materials that the students had dumped as they were moving out. During each graduation period, although it might appear that the students are the busiest, it is really each institute’s cleaning staff that works the hardest. Throughout the university, each dormitory’s trash was piled as high as fruit in an orchard following a thunderstorm, and every day the cleaning staff had to collect the trash, transport it, and clean up afterward.
As Yahui was passing the piles of trash, one book attracted her attention. This was a small copy of the Heart Sutra, only as big as a fist and half as thick as a finger. The volume, with its red title and yellow cover, resembled a book of quotations from a certain year. Because of its small size, it couldn’t be placed with the larger volumes, and therefore had been tossed into a pile next to them. Nevertheless, this copy of the Heart Sutra attracted Yahui’s attention. She looked at the volume, then forced herself to turn away, since she still needed to retrieve the marriage certificate from under her pillow. The ceremony’s fifth event was about to begin. Feeling as though she were in a mud pit, Yahui waded through the trash bags to the elevator. As the elevator was ascending, she saw a discarded copy of the Annotated Daodejing on the dust-covered floor. The cover was curled up like the leg of a discarded pair of pants, and just as Yahui was bending down to pick it up, the elevator arrived at the seventh floor.
The elevator came to a stop, and after the doors opened, Yahui glanced again at that copy of the Daodejing before hurrying back to her room. Her task was as simple as picking up a cup and taking a sip of boiled water. She entered her room and retrieved the marriage certificate, then she stuffed the document into her pocket. She quickly left the room and locked the door, but at this point, things took a strange turn, as though she had just noticed an ant hole that was about to cause a dam to collapse.
At the base of the wall in the hallway outside her door there was a discarded brick-sized copy of the New Testament with a hard black cover and gold title, and below the title there was a line that read “Chinese Protestant Association Internal Publication.” This was a brand-new book, and it looked as though it had just been printed. In the lamplight, the black cover was shimmering with the light of Christ. Yahui was puzzled as to why she had not noticed this volume when she first entered, and she half suspected that the deities might have placed it in the entranceway after she went in. Perhaps they had done so to test whether she was pretending she hadn’t seen it? Perhaps it was to test how she felt about other people’s deities?
She leaned over to pick up the book. Then, she naturally also had to pick up the Daoist scripture. So, upon entering the elevator, she picked up that copy of the Annotated Daodejing that was lying in the corner. She felt that when she was picking up another religion’s scriptures, she obviously couldn’t leave her own religion’s Heart Sutra lying in the trash. Therefore, when she got out of the elevator, she reflexively glanced over at the copy of the Heart Sutra that was lying next to that pile of discarded books. However, where there had originally been three bundles of discarded books, now there were six or seven, not to mention several additional bags of discarded clothes and other items.
Yahui knew that the center’s cleaning woman was somewhere in the building picking up trash, and when she went upstairs to fetch the marriage certificate, the cleaner had been taking trash and discarded books back to the auditorium. Yahui looked around now but didn’t see her. It occurred to her that she should leave the scriptures she was holding with these other bundles of books. She picked up the copy of the Heart Sutra, and as she did so she saw that in another bundle of books there was a newish copy of the Altar Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch. She tried to remove the latter volume from the knee-high bundle, and as she tugged at it the bundle fell apart, whereupon copies of the Bible and the Quran tumbled out. After picking up both scriptures, she opened another bundle, in which she quickly found a copy of the Diamond Sutra as well as a volume of collected Bible stories. She put these scriptures in a pile, then opened another bundle, and another. She even checked in a trash bag filled with old newspapers, as though a jewel had gotten thrown away and she had no choice but to rummage through the trash to look for it. Each time she opened another bundle, she found scriptures that her classmates had thrown out along with the training center’s instructional materials. These included Buddhist, Daoist, Islamic, Protestant, and Catholic scriptures—scriptures from the five major religions that had all been discarded along with ordinary trash, like sacred fruit tossed into a wastebasket. These sacred books were still books—printed words on paper, like any other commodity that can be thrown away after being used. A book’s fate is like a person’s life, and no one can escape this inexorable path toward death, as Yahui’s shifu had demonstrated. However, how could the Buddha, the Bodhisattva, Siddhartha, Laozi, Christ, and the Virgin Mary, as well as Muhammad and Allah, not to mention the celestial deity she had imagined in her heart, in whose image she had made a papercut, and who oversees everything—how could they all be like ordinary people? They are not like ordinary people, and similarly, the scriptures that record and praise their words and actions are naturally not like ordinary books.
The light in the lobby seemed to be exhausted, as muddled as an octogenarian’s gaze. The dusk light permeated the entire building, and the terrifying stillness was reminiscent of Imam Tian’s description of Wang Changping’s tombstone. Yahui took all the scriptures and arranged them in a pile with the largest on the bottom and the smallest on top, so that they resembled a miniature pyramid, and then tied them together with some twine she had found lying on the ground. She knew that most of these volumes were scriptures that disciples had discarded because they belonged to other faiths: Daoists would throw out their copies of the Bible and the Quran, and Protestants would throw out their copies of the Altar Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch and the Annotated Heart Sutra. If a disciple happened to have two copies of the Bible or the Daodejing, they might throw out the older one and keep the newer edition. What had been thrown out were all scriptures pertaining to other faiths, which had been issued to the students for the center’s class on Selected Readings of Scriptures from Other Faiths. Now that the students had graduated, they had discarded these volumes the way one might throw out an ill-fitting article of clothing that one has received as a gift.
The air was filled with dust, and as Yahui picked through the trash, her back and legs became so sore that she had to stand up and stretch. Only after she had tied up several dozen scriptures did she remember the ceremony and performance that were still unfolding in the auditorium.
She froze for a second, then picked up her bundle of scriptures and headed to the main door. Just as she reached the entranceway, before she even had a chance to open the door, the religion building’s main gate suddenly opened inward, and a twelve- or thirteen-year-old boy appeared before her. He was covered in sweat, as though he had just run dozens of li to find her.
“Are you Nun Yahui?”
Yahui looked at that boy as though she were looking at a holy child. Staring at him in astonishment, she nodded.
“You must quickly go home—your apartment has been broken into!”
Yahui almost dropped the bundle of scriptures that she was holding. After relaying his message, the boy ran back out of the religion building like someone who goes to report a fire and immediately rushes back to the burning house. However, as the boy was leaving, he turned and said, “I’m going to get Gu Mingzheng. You should immediately return home. If you don’t hurry, the thieves might steal everything!” Then he headed toward the art institute’s auditorium, following the same path Yahui had taken when she arrived. It was as though after reporting that his master’s house was on fire, he was now rushing to report to the firefighters, running as fast as thunder and rain.
Yahui paused for a couple of seconds in front of the religion building, and then, without a word, began running toward the university’s east gate.