Reverberation
By Ha Jin
My friend came and spent a weekend here.
In China he used to be an interpreter
and guide foreign mountaineers.
He told me he had once accompanied
a group of Japanese
to a snow mountain in the Uighur Region.
They climbed for a whole day
but did not make the summit.
A storm was gathering, so they turned back.
On their way down, a young woman
(the only one on the team) fell off a cliff
and disappeared in the ice below.
She was injured but not fatally.
“Help, help me!” she yelled
at the men two hundred feet above her.
None of them went down,
though they were all well trained.
They listened and turned on a recorder.
“Help, help! I’ll pay you ten million yen!”
Her screams were kept on a cassette tape
for her family and insurance company.
“Those Japs are beasts,”
my friend said. “If she were a Chinese
I would’ve gone down to help her.”
His story saddened me. After he left,
the voice still lingered in my home—
“Help, I’ll pay you ten million yen!”
I don’t know if he could be so gallant
to a Chinese woman as he claimed.
I’ve begun to walk my dog every day.
Copyright Credit: Ha Jin, "Reverbaration" from Facing Shadows. Copyright © 1996 by Ha Jin. Reprinted by permission of Hanging Loose Press.
Source: Facing Shadows (Hanging Loose Press, 1996)