by Mo Yan
Hei-hai slipped into the jute field like a fish that has swum into the ocean. The jute leaves rustled under the shimmering autumn sun.
‘Hei-hai!’
‘Hei-hai!’
1
One February morning, I woke up to something alarming that had happened overnight – the whites of my eyes had grown larger than my irises, tiny black bubbles swimming in a vast white mass. Imagine if you were walking down a narrow street and came face to face with a big dog. It was the sort of look you would see in its eyes. I stared into the mirror for a moment. I pursed my lips and tilted my head as I tried to think of what might have caused this startling change.
I have a rather violent temper, though I try and practice restraint and patience, and rarely express any sort of rancour or fall into depression. I have lived an average life these thirty years past. When my parents divorced, I was still young, and when they became busy with their own affairs, it did not really affect my upbringing. I was not a very talented child, and I had my share of quirks, but I did well enough in school to go on to university and graduate with reasonable results. I did not have any fixed plans after graduation and alternated between temporary jobs and unemployment, eventually marrying a steady and unremarkable woman, Lantu. I expected her to have a story of her own, but when she met me, the story seemed to lose its flavour. That suited me just fine. I am not one who likes overpowering tastes and cannot stand too much drama.
She rarely displays her temper. In fact, it is hard to distinguish between when she is satisfied and when she is not. At the end of each day, she puts on a smile, cleans up and get into her pajamas. Her breathing is always steady when she drifts off to sleep, all the while with my hand clasped within hers. From the day we married, it was as though we were already an old couple. She is perfectly suited for a man like me – pleasant-looking, well-raised, methodical about housework and a thoughtful wife all round.
She is plump, with a round face, the type people say is sure to help a husband prosper. Eat an apple before bed, drink a glass of salt water upon waking and take a short nap in the afternoon – these are the laws she lives by. Her major at university was information management, and her working hours are occupied by routine office work at a state-owned company.
Working for the government is not the most exciting job. Recently, there had been a juicy story in the local newspaper. The sewerage system had backed up at a certain state bureau and the staff had gone to great lengths to repair it. The problem, it seemed, had been caused by a large wad of used condoms in the pipes. I suppose when there is nothing else to do in the office, people must find their pleasure somehow.
Lantu sought satisfaction in running a clothing store on the popular e-commerce platform, Taobao. She has built up a good reputation and has reached five-star seller status. She is also a respectable woman in real life. For instance, at my insistence, she has no contact with her former boyfriends and she never goes out alone with another man.
As for me, I have been working in the sales department of a foreign company for the last three years. I spend seven to eight hours on the phone every day, sourcing customers, holding my pee and enduring thirst, paying the necessary lip service in order to make a sale. Sometimes, I find myself with a phone stuck to each ear. After work, my mind is overloaded with facts and figures that buzz around my head like houseflies.
But I had bad timing. I bought a house just as prices soared to twenty-five thousand per square metre. With early interest rates at three percent, I have to pay three hundred and forty thousand yuan in interest. That means I need at least seven to eight thousand a month just to make ends meet. And now that there’s a house, I have to think about giving Lantu a proper wedding. We may be married in the eyes of the law but I have never had the time to plan a decent ceremony. One can buy silver and gold, but Lantu wants a diamond ring – never mind how many carats – and it needs to have a diamond that will flash at night. Perhaps I should take a toy gun and rob a bank.
But I don’t have time to worry about faking it for the wedding photos, not a single moment. When I leave the house, Lantu is not yet awake, and when I come home, she is sleeping. I have essentially forgotten about the ways between husband and wife. Money does not care whether one lives or dies, much less about one’s sex life. Newlyweds get no holiday and there is no leave for funerals. You are livestock, a dog to the company. You go through your shift every day, with your ear glued to the phone and put your back into earning a few measly dollars by way of your talent. If you get promoted, the company shows a little sympathy and invites you to take your family on a holiday abroad. I have thought about taking Lantu to Europe or the US for our honeymoon, but that door has never opened. The opportunity has never arisen and since Lantu has never even mentioned a wedding gown or a ring, I guess it does not matter.
This morning, when I stood looking into the mirror, an overwhelming sense of desperation washed over me and I felt like I was having a panic attack. I had invited Fox Co.’s buyer out to dinner the previous day. Her English name is Donna, but I prefer to call her Duoli for this narrative. Duoli had brought her own bottle of Moutai liquor, and after three drinks, she was ready to unburden herself. Duoli wrote poetry. She had written a piece about her motherland as well as some love poetry for Fox Co.’s in-house magazine, and she displayed an almost maternal attitude towards me in our dealings. She said that I had heart-rending eyes.
I have had to put up with a lot of ambiguous hinting from the opposite sex in my line of work, especially from middle-aged women, and I have known Duoli’s feelings for some time, only pretending not to. I had had too much to drink once before, and vomited blood. Another time I had drunk myself into a stupor. After the two hospital stays those outings had occasioned, Duoli and I had established a firm partnership between us, a sort of fraternity.
There’s no need to look down on me – I hate all tendencies towards alcoholism and have sworn off drinking before. But in my line of work, half the battle is PR. If you don’t touch liquor, isn’t that like a scholar who knows nothing about the Wei or Jin Dynasties and is not capable of intellectual conversation? The guys and girls from Fox Co. are no better than me, always indulging in wining and dining, talking endlessly about their under the table deals. If you do not even understand this, then what can you possibly say about the art of sales? And that is before you start giving your all, following up, sweet talking and turning yourself inside out, simply to get Fox Co. to place one little order. It’s like a damn sexy woman winking at you from across the room. No matter what hunger it stirs up nor how sincere the desire, she won’t invite you in. But still, it’s better than nothing, especially given the dismal state of the economy, with foreclosures, layoffs, and personal safety at risk. When you spend eighteen hours a day looking at a computer, searching for material, following up, answering emails, writing applications and filling in forms, your brain is ready to explode. You are kept busy until you are dog tired, and then suddenly this beautiful woman starts flirting with you – even if she is thousands of miles away and out of reach, you can’t help but be grateful, because it represents an infinite supply of hope.
Usually when it is drinking time, I hear from Maya. Maya is a delicate, small-faced girl with the spiciness of a Chongqing meal, but I’ll come back to her later. Right now, we best get on with last night’s incident.
The Moutai liquor that Duoli had brought was really something special. I knew it was fake from the moment it was placed on the table, but when I drank, it had a mellow flavour. The counterfeiters had put in some real effort. Duoli was attentive and urged people to drink, all the while maintaining a mischievous look in her eye. The mischief would turn out to be an order worth 100 000 yuan, an amount that was sure to come with strings attached.
Sometimes a woman’s modesty is a load of shit, and sometimes it’s true, but when it came to Duoli, it was a little vague. That night, she was particularly hard to read.
I tend to lose physical control when I get good and d
runk, but this time was odd. The drunkenness didn’t come on gradually and instead of calling Maya as I usually do, I spiralled straight down the alcoholic abyss.
I awoke in a hotel room to find my pants undone. Duoli had removed my belt. In the scar on her bare, flat chest, I could see the shine of that 100 000 yuan order. If I had reached out to touch her, I would have been able to feel the raised features of Benjamin Franklin’s face on the hundred dollar bill. But my eyes were stung and my mind turned to mush. Duoli had hinted before about a loss in her life, but I never realised that she had lost a breast. God, I had never seen her naked before. I was sorry for the guys who had one night stands with her. It must feel awful to lose not only one’s youth, but also a breast, to see it wrapped up and thrown into the fire. I started sweating in my guilt and wanted to escape. I picked my belt up from off the ground and when I did so, the buckle rattled noisily on the concrete floor.
I was confused because of Duoli and the money. By the time I decided to turn around and had walked halfway back, she had already gone. She must have been hurt, but I was hurt worse than she. From George Washington to Benjamin Franklin, every face on every US banknote would have been weeping for me at that point. My sales record was like a limp dog. I was empty-handed. Ah, Duoli. For the order, I should have stayed with your flat chest for a while, or even simply to say thank you for the steady stream of food and wine.
I stopped at a roadside BBQ stall for a beer and stuffed myself with all sorts of cheap cuts, only leaving a pile of bamboo sticks behind. It was one in the morning. The wind was cold but the night was still going strong – pedestrians, drivers, taxi fares, the street lights and even the insects were out in force. Poor little creatures, shimmering now in the warmth of the light where they will eventually exhaust themselves to death. I got home and lay in bed thinking about their heroism.
My stomach had started to burn in the middle of the night and I suffered bouts of diarrhoea. I felt weak and my legs started to shake. The alarm rang not long after and I proceeded to get ready for work.
The president of Asia-Pacific operations would be at the office this morning, having come from Singapore to do a spot check, but also to cut staff and spending. It did not matter whether our suits were made of nylon or wool, our shirts black or white, our undergarments full of holes or not because the president would turn up in his finely tailored suit.
Thoughts of inflation and the rising unemployment rate filled my head as I brushed my teeth, and how if I got sacked, then Lantu would leave me I would become a homeless dog. I swept my towel back and forth and touched my tongue to the tip of my nose. I turned on my electric razor with stiff fingers and noisily shaved my three-day-old beard. What was usually just a bit of stubble was now full and fluffy. Why was that? I stared in surprise at the cold light in my eyes. Fear turned to anger and the monster in the mirror suddenly bit me. I hit the icy glass and jumped back a step. The electric shaver smashed clean through the mirror. A small cockroach crawled out, disconcerted.
Lantu came over and cleaned up the mess I had made, saying softly, ‘We can go to Ikea and buy one with a wooden frame.’ She did not ask why I had broken the mirror. I really wanted to ask her if I looked like a dog, but the matter did not seem to spark her curiosity at all. She went back to making breakfast.
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First published by Penguin Group (Australia) in association with Penguin
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Copyright © Mo Yan, 2015
Translated from the original Chinese by Howard Goldblatt
First published in Chinese as ‘Tou Ming De Hong Luo Bo’ by
Chinese Writers Magazine, 1985
The moral right of the author has been asserted
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ISBN: 978-0-73431-080-4