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he had been with us every day. Hadn’t we watched him with care? ‘I was not always with you. Don’t be fooled by superficial appearances,’ he said in his casual tone. After his father coaxed him away, I found a hoe and exterminated those little vipers.
    â€œWhen we got home, we stayed up nights to prevent his sneaking away again. Yet after two days, fresh wounds had appeared on his arms—like pairs of red spots from snakebites. He said to us, ‘Why bother to tire yourselves out. You simply can’t understand that I’m only sitting with you in appearance. But there’s no place I can’t go even while I seem to be sitting with you. There are so many snakes, and they lose their way often. So I gather them from here and there, so they won’t feel lonely. Of course you can’t see them, but yesterday I found one over there under the bookshelf. I can always find snakes if I look around. I was afraid of them when I was young. I even bit a snake’s head once. I can’t help laughing at myself when I think of it now.’ He kept talking to us like this.”
    One day, while sitting with his back to us, Sha-yuan suddenly patted his head with his hand. We walked over, and Sha-yuan’s mother turned him around so he was facing us. His facial expression was calm and relaxed. Cautiously choosing my words, I asked him what he was thinking about while sitting here, and if he was feeling lonely.
    â€œListen,” he replied briefly.
    â€œWhat do you hear?”
    â€œNothing, very quiet. But the situation will change completely after nine o’clock in the evening.”
    â€œHow can you possibly dare to desert us like that? How can we live without you?” Sha-yuan’s mother started her lament.
    â€œYou can’t call it desertion,” Sha-yuan said gently. “I was born to catch snakes.”
    I advised Sha-yuan’s mother not to worry too much about her son. In my opinion, her boy, odd as he was, appeared to be a genius, who might one day turn out to be somebody.
    â€œWe don’t care if he will be somebody,” the mother said. “Both his father and I are only ordinary people. How is it that we should have a son who is involved in such shameful business? Raising poisonous snakes, that’s frightening. What does he want to do? I might as well have given birth to a poisonous snake! We simply can’t stop worrying about him. We’re completely worn out by him. The worst thing is that now he can do strange things even without going outdoors. He always has a way to achieve what he wants.”
    *   *   *
    One day I saw Sha-yuan’s mother coming out of the air-raid shelter with a hoe in her hand. She looked wan and sallow. She told me she had just exterminated another nest of little snakes, eight altogether. She was almost bald, and she walked like an aged woman. Behind her appeared Sha-yuan’s father, an old man who couldn’t stop blinking one eye. Finally Sha-yuan himself emerged. His back was bent, and he appeared calm. When he saw me, he nodded and started talking: “I created this scene of slaughter on purpose. It might even be described as spectacular—eight lives destroyed once and for all. To them, it was not a matter of any particular terror. I was only surprised by the firmness and confidence of the hands that raised the hoe.”
    When asked if he was the one who took his parents to the shelter, he said yes. As soon as they asked, he took them there. He had always maintained a kind of curiosity about his parents’ behavior. While he was talking, his mother stared at the sky with her empty eyes, and his father mumbled repeatedly: “Extreme views can cause tremendous difficulty in a person’s life, but beautiful scenery can open one’s mind.”
    I found that the slaughterer, the mother, was the most crestfallen among the three, but Sha-yuan remained detached. All at once it