THE YEARS FLOW LIKE WATER; some stories pass by quickly while others linger on. In addition to the matter of Mr. Li’s blood-swollen turtlehead, there was the matter of Mr. He jumping from a building. Of course, Mr. He was Mr. He; he had nothing to do with me, but his death is still etched deep inside my consciousness. I have to think it through before I can sort my own life out.
Before jumping to his death, Mr. He was being held in a lab building. According to father, Mr. He wasn’t particularly old, but he had academic seniority over even my father’s teachers. Before the Cultural Revolution, he wasn’t officially retired but he no longer ran things. In his own words, “I’ve done all I set out to do in this lifetime; all that’s left is to live a few more years.” Father also said that even though Mr. He was an elder, he didn’t seem old because his mind was still sharp. Whenever you asked him something, he would always have a complete reply. When he had said what he needed to say, he stopped and there were no extraneous words. Based on that, my father predicted that he would live even longer than the people who were in their fifties at the time. Mr. He was arrested because he had been a very high-ranking official once upon a time. So he jumped off the fifth floor.
When Mr. He was getting ready to jump from the building, Xu You happened to have been passing by. Mr. He even spoke to Xu You, which meant he didn’t jump right away. Later, I questioned Xu You dozens of times, asking him what Mr. He had said and how he had said it. All that dummy could remember was Mr. He saying, “Kid, move!”
“And then?”
“And then splat, like a watermelon!”
I pressed and pressed but all I got was kid, move and watermelon. I wanted to punch Xu.
When I was young, I often thought about death. Mr. He was the first dead person I had seen. I wanted to learn what death was like from him in the same way that I would later want to learn what women were like from Chen Qingyang. Sadly, both of these specimens were poor choices. Take Mr. He for example, I never got a chance to speak to him when he was alive. That dumbass Xu was so shaken up by the event that he forgot everything. How can anyone possibly believe that someone who was about to kill himself would leave the world with the last words, “Kid, move”?
I saw everything, after it happened. When his head hit the pavement, brain matter splattered everywhere. Using his point of contact as the center, there were bits and pieces of a fresh pork lung-like substance spread throughout a five-meters’ radius. In addition to the ground, there were also bits that splashed onto the first-floor walls and windows. With such a dramatic death, I refused to believe that aside from “Kid, move,” he said nothing.
For a long time after Mr. He’s death, dark stains remained on the ground around where he had landed. The human brain contains large amounts of oil. Mr. He was known to calculate and predict just about everything (playing chess against him gave me a taste of that), he must have known this would happen. A person who chose to have his organ of thought become one with the dust under other people’s shoes must have possessed a spirit that was beyond my ken.
Even though Mr. He died without ever having his name exonerated, my respect for him remains undiminished. In fact, my love and admiration for him know no bounds. No matter what other people say about him (reactionary academicism, KMT1 bureaucratic tendencies, etc.), my respect remains unwavering. In my heart, he will always be that great man who created a great spectacle around which the countless masses circled and stared.
1 Kuomintang, Chinese nationalist opposition party in Mainland China (1927–1949).