When I belch, I begin to miss my grandfather. Ceaseless belching is hereditary: my mother got it from her father; I got it from my mother. All the other people in the family escaped from the trouble. Sometimes it was hard to stop belching. Once my mother patted my shoulder and said: “Look! A one-hundred Yuan bill on the ground!” I forgot belching and looked down: there was nothing. And my mother laughed: “I cured it!”

     In my memory, my grandfather was always sitting there, sinking into an old, green sofa in the corner of his bedroom, next to a screen door leading to the balcony. He never moved. He never talked. Outside it was bright and sunny, light flowing into the room through the screen. My grandfather stayed in the darkness, his face red, his long eyebrows drooping, his large thick earlobes similar to the ones of the big-bellied Buddha statuette lying on the TV stand. He was near the sunshine but seldom separated from the sofa, as if it were his throne and he were the king of silence, a faint smile lingering on his chin.

     That afternoon he was sitting in a chair behind my grandmother, who was playing mahjong with her old neighbors in the community recreation center. As usual, he watched my grandmother silently, a cup of tea in his hand. My grandmother, immersed in the game, noticed nothing until the cup fell down to the floor and broke. Hospital. Cerebral haemorrhage. Craniotomy. Coma.

     In the ICU, I was scared by the other patient lying nearby, who spread his limbs on the bed like crucified Jesus. His face was burnt black, his tangled hair like a bird’s nest, his beard wriggling like three dying, stiffening leeches. I didn’t dare to look at his eyes. I was afraid that I would not be able to find his eyeballs. He could not stop shaking because of the pain, howling like a beast falling off a cliff. The survivor of a car accident. How can my grandfather sleep, I thought, with those sounds from hell? My grandfather looked the same, quiet and peaceful, as if nothing had ever happened, as if his skull had not been sawed open and his brain had not been rummaged for blood clots. It was a miracle, the doctor said, few people in their seventies could stand such a surgery. Everything was good and we only needed to wait for him to wake up. If it was not for the pipes plugged into his head, I would think that he slept there like a prince, and a kiss could revive him.

     Then came the belching. It didn’t stop. No one could help. I doubted, if my grandfather were awake, he himself could do anything about the belching. Even a one-hundred Yuan bill would not work this time. The pipes could not stay still and my grandfather’s brain kept bleeding. He was removed from the room of howls.

     The day my grandfather died, I was assigned to clean the wall of his living room. I was amazed. When you removed the table, removed the chairs, and removed the fridge, the wall was not as green as you thought it would be. The fresh color of apple green, the background with which you were so familiar that you usually ignored it, was covered by numerous tiny, dark brown stains. I didn’t know what they were. Like grease, smoke, all those little unhappy things in life, pains that had been long forgotten, or corroded tears. I tried to clean them with a rag, moving my arm mechanically, not thinking about anything. Inheriting silence, I sat in front of the wall, with my back to all the people coming and mourning. I didn’t raise my head. I didn’t talk. I didn’t miss any stain. I hoped I could make the wall look as new as possible. There were so many stains there that, by the end of the day, I realized that I could never finish the cleaning.

     My mother even smiled after the funeral. After all, this was a natural thing. Everyone knew. My grandfather had lived seventy-two years, respected and admired by many people. It was not a sad death. At least he didn’t suffer from the pain. We nodded and shook various hands. But when she sat back in our car, she burst into tears. “I have no father now.” She cried like a little girl, a lost kitten crouching in the corner of the rear seat. I was paralyzed in silence, feeling like in a dream, a weird dream from which I couldn’t wake up for years.

     And the ceramic statuette of the big-bellied Buddha disappeared, the one laughing with his belly naked, whose thick earlobes represented a lot of luck. I didn’t see it and no one mentioned it. I didn’t ask. When I belched again, I thought, “This is gonna kill me someday.”

Pembroke 49 (March 2017)