by Mo Yan
Later on he learned that that was the year Granddad, who loved Grandma dearly, had fallen in love with the hired girl, Passion, who had grown into a bright-eyed young woman. At the moment when Father bit Grandma, Granddad, who had grown tired of her jealousy, was living with Passion in a house he’d bought in a neighbouring village. Everyone said that this second grandma of mine was no economy lantern, and that Grandma was afraid of her, but this is something I’ll clear up later. Second Grandma eventually had a girl by Granddad. In 1938, Japanese soldiers murdered this young aunt of mine with a bayonet, then gang-raped Second Grandma – this, too, I’ll clear up later.
Granddad and Father were exhausted. The wound throbbed in Granddad’s arm, which seemed to be on fire. Father’s feet had swollen until his cloth shoes nearly split their seams, and he fantasised about the exquisite pleasure of airing the rotting skin of his feet in the moonlight. But he didn’t have the strength to sit up and take off his shoes. Instead, he rolled over and rested his head on Granddad’s hard stomach so he could look up into the starry night and let the moon’s rays light up his face. He could hear the murmuring flow of the Black Water River and see black clouds gather in the sky above him. He remembered Uncle Arhat’s saying once that, when the Milky Way lay horizontally across the sky, autumn rains would fall. He had only really seen autumn water once in his life.
The sorghum was ready for harvest when the Black Water River rose and burst its banks, flooding both the fields and the village. The stalks strained to keep their heads above water; rats and snakes scurried and slithered up them to escape drowning. Father had gone with Uncle Arhat to the wall, which the villagers were reinforcing, and gazed uneasily at the yellow water rushing towards him. The villagers made rafts from kindling and paddled out to the fields to hack off the ears of grain, which were already sprouting new green buds. Bundles of soaked deep-red and emerald-green ears of sorghum weighted down the rafts so much it’s a wonder they didn’t sink. The dark, gaunt men, barefoot and bare-chested, wearing conical straw hats, stood with their legs akimbo on the rafts, poling with all their strength as they rocked from side to side.
The water in the village was knee-high, covering the legs of livestock, whose waste floated on the surface. In the dying rays of the autumn sun, the water shone like liquefied metal; tips of sorghum stalks too far away to be harvested formed a canopy of golden red just above the rippling surface, over which flocks of wild geese flew. Father could see a bright, broad body of water flowing slowly through the densest patch of red sorghum, in sharp contrast to the muddy, stagnant water around him; it was, he knew, the Black Water River. On one of the rafts lay a silver-bellied, green-backed grass carp, a long, thin sorghum stalk stuck through its gills. The farmer proudly held it up to show the people on the wall; it was nearly half as tall as he was. Blood oozed from its gills, and its mouth was open as it looked at my father with dull, sorrowful eyes.
Father was thinking about how Uncle Arhat had bought a fish from a farmer once, and how Grandma had scraped the scales from its belly, then made soup out of it; just thinking about that delicious soup gave him an appetite. He sat up. ‘Dad,’ he said, ‘aren’t you hungry? I am. Can you find me something to eat? I’m starving. . . .’
Granddad sat up and fished around in his belt until he found a bullet, which he inserted into the cylinder; then he snapped it shut, sending the bullet into the chamber. He pulled the trigger, and there was a loud crack. ‘Douguan,’ he said, ‘let’s go find your mother. . . .’
‘No, Dad,’ Father replied in a high-pitched, frightened voice, ‘Mother’s dead. But we’re still alive, and I’m hungry. Let’s get something to eat.’
Father pulled Granddad to his feet. ‘Where?’ Granddad mumbled. ‘Where can we go?’ So Father led him by the hand into the sorghum field, where they walked in a crooked line, as though their objective was the moon, hanging high and icy in the sky.
A growl emerged from the field of corpses. Granddad and Father stopped in their tracks and turned to see a dozen pairs of green eyes, like will-o’-the-wisps, and several indigo shadows tumbling on the ground. Granddad took out his pistol and fired at two of the green eyes; the howl of a dying dog accompanied the extinguishing of those eyes. Granddad fired seven shots in all, and several wounded dogs writhed in agony among the corpses. While he was emptying his pistol into the pack, the uninjured dogs fled into the sorghum field, out of range, where they howled furiously at the two humans.
The last couple of bullets from Granddad’s pistol had travelled only thirty paces or so before thudding to the ground. Father watched them tumble in the moonlight, so slowly he could have reached out and caught them. And the once crisp crack of the pistol sounded more like the phlegmatic cough of a doddering old man. A tortured, sympathetic expression spread across Granddad’s face as he looked down at the weapon in his hand.
‘Out of bullets, Dad?’
The five hundred bullets they’d brought back from town in the goat’s belly had been used up in a matter of hours. The pistol had aged overnight, and Granddad came to the painful realisation that it was no longer capable of carrying out his wishes; time for them to part ways.
Holding the gun out in front of him, he carefully studied the muted reflection of the moonlight on the barrel, then loosened his grip and let the gun fall heavily to the ground.
The green-eyed dogs returned to the corpses, timidly at first. But their eyes quickly disappeared, and the moonlight was reflected off rolling waves of bluish fur; Granddad and Father could hear the sounds of dogs tearing human bodies with their fangs.
‘Let’s go into the village, Dad,’ Father said.
Granddad wavered for a moment, so Father tugged on him, and they fell into step.
By then most of the fires in the village had gone out, leaving red-hot cinders that gave off an acrid heat amid the crumbling walls and shattered buildings. Hot winds whirled above the village roads. The murky air was stifling. Roofs of houses, their supports burned out beneath them, had collapsed in mountains of smoke, dust, and cinders. Bodies were strewn atop the village wall and on the roads. A page in the history of our village had been turned. At one time the site had been a wasteland covered with brambles, underbrush, and reeds, a paradise for foxes and wild rabbits. Then a few huts appeared, and it became a haven for escaped murderers, drunks, gamblers, who built homes, cultivated the land, and turned it into a paradise for humans, forcing out the foxes and wild rabbits, who set up howls of protest on the eve of their departure. Now the village lay in ruins; man had created it, and man had destroyed it. It was now a sorrowful paradise, a monument to both grief and joy, built upon ruins. In 1960, when the dark cloud of famine settled over the Shandong Peninsula, even though I was only four years old I could dimly sense that Northeast Gaomi Township had never been anything but a pile of ruins, and that its people had never been able to rid their hearts of the shattered buildings, nor would they ever be able to.
That night, after the smoke and sparks from the other houses had died out, our buildings were still burning, sending skyward green-tinged tongues of flame and the intoxicating aroma of strong wine, released in an instant after all those years. Blue roof tiles, deformed by the intense heat, turned scarlet, then leaped into the air through a wall of flames that illuminated Granddad’s hair, which had turned three-quarters grey in the space of a week. A roof came crashing down, momentarily blotting out the flames, which then roared out of the rubble, stronger than ever. The loud crash nearly crushed the breath out of Father and Granddad.
Our house, which had sheltered the father and son of the Shan family as they grew rich, then had sheltered Granddad after his murderous deed, then had sheltered Grandma, Granddad, Father, Uncle Arhat, and all the men who worked for them, a sanctuary for their kindnesses and their grievances, had now completed its historical mission. I hated that sanctuary: though it had sheltered decent emotions, it had also sheltered heinous crimes. Father, when you were hiding in the burrow we dug for you in the floor o
f my home back in 1957, you recalled those days of your past in the unrelenting darkness. On no fewer than 365 occasions, in your mind you saw the roof of your house crash down amid the flames, and wondered what was going through the mind of your father, my granddad. So my fantasies were chasing yours while yours were chasing Granddad’s.
As he watched the roof collapse, Granddad became as angry as he’d been the day he abandoned Grandma and moved to another village to be with his new love, Passion. He had learned then that Grandma had shamelessly taken up with Black Eye, the leader of an organisation called the Iron Society, and at the time he wasn’t sure what filled his heart – loathing or love, pain or anger. When he later returned to Grandma’s arms, his feelings for her were so confused he couldn’t sort them out. In the beginning, his emotional warfare scarred only his own heart, and Grandma’s scarred only her own. Finally, they hurt each other. Only when Grandma smiled up at him as she lay dead in the sorghum field did he realise the grievous punishment life had meted out to him. He loved my father as a magpie loves the last remaining egg in its nest. But by then it was too late, for fate, cold and calculating, had sentenced him to a cruel end that was waiting for him down the road.
‘Dad, our house is gone. . . .’ Father said.
Granddad rubbed Father’s head as he stared at the ruins of his home, then took Father’s hand and began stumbling aimlessly down the road under the waning light of the flames and the waxing light of the moon.
At the head of the village they heard an old man’s voice: ‘Is that you, Number Three? Why didn’t you bring the oxcart?’
The sound of that voice gave Granddad and Father such a warm feeling they forgot how tired they were and rushed over to see who it was.
A hunched-over elderly man rose to greet them, carefully sizing up Granddad with his ancient eyes, nearly touching his face. Granddad didn’t like his watchful look and was repulsed by the greedy stench that came from his mouth.
‘You’re not my Number Three,’ the old man said unhappily, his head wobbling as he sat down on a pile of loot. There were trunks, cupboards, dining tables, farm tools, harnesses, ripped comforters, cooking pots, earthenware bowls. He was sitting on a small mountain of stuff and guarding it as a wolf guards its kill. Behind him, two calves, three goats, and a mule were tied to a willow tree.
‘You old dog!’ Granddad growled through clenched teeth. ‘Get the hell out of here!’
The old man rose up on his haunches and said amiably, ‘Ah, my brother, let’s not be envious. I risked my life to drag this stuff out of the flames!’
‘I’ll fuck your living mother! Climb down from there!’ Granddad lashed out angrily.
‘You have no right to talk to me like that. I didn’t do anything to you. You’re the one who’s asking for trouble. What gives you the right to curse me like that?’ he complained.
‘Curse you? I’ll goddamn kill you! We’re not in a desperate struggle with Japan just so you can go on a looting binge! You bastard, you old bastard! Douguan, where’s your gun?’
‘It’s under the horse’s belly,’ Father said.
Granddad jumped up onto the mountain of stuff and, with a single kick, sent the old man sprawling onto the ground. He rose to his knees and begged, ‘Spare me, Eighth Route Master, spare me!’
‘I’m not with the Eighth Route Army,’ Granddad said, ‘or the Ninth Route. I’m Yu Zhan’ao the bandit!’
‘Spare me, Commander Yu, spare me! What good would it do to let all this stuff burn? I’m not the only “potato picker” from the village. Those thieves got all the good stuff. I’m too old and too slow, and all I could find was this junk.’
Granddad picked up a wooden table and threw it at the old man’s bald head. He screamed and held his bleeding scalp as he rolled in the dirt. Granddad reached down and picked him up by his collar. Looking straight into those tortured eyes, he said, ‘Our hero, the “potato picker”, then raised his fist and drove it with a loud crack into the old man’s face, sending him crumpling to the ground, face up. Granddad walked up and kicked him in the face, hard.
3
MOTHER AND MY three-year-old little uncle already had spent a day and a night hiding in the dry well. The morning before, she had gone to the working well with two earthenware jugs over her shoulder. No sooner had she bent over to see her face in the water than she heard the clang of a gong from the village wall and the shouts of the night watchman, Old Man Wu: ‘The Japs are here, they’ve surrounded the village!’ She was so frightened she dropped the jugs and carrying pole into the well, spun on her heel, and ran home. But before she got there she met her parents, my maternal grandfather and grandmother; he was armed with a musket, his wife was carrying her son and a cloth-wrapped parcel.
Ever since the battle at the Black Water River, the villagers had been preparing for the calamity they expected to come any day. Only three or four families had gone into hiding; the others, though frightened, were reluctant to give up their broken-down homes, their wells – bitter and sweet – and their quilts, no matter how thin and tattered they might have been. During the week of the lull, Granddad had taken Father into the country town to buy bullets, driven by a desire to settle accounts with Pocky Leng. It never occurred to him that the Japanese bloodbath would inundate his own village.
On the evening of the fifteenth day of the eighth lunar month, Zhang Ruolu the Elder – he with one large eye and one small, he with the extraordinary bearing, he the intellectual who had studied in a private school, he who had played such a vital role in the burial of the martyred warriors – mobilised all able-bodied residents to reinforce the village wall and repair the gates, and appointed night watchmen to bang gongs and shout warnings at the first sighting of enemy troops. The villagers, male and female, young and old, took turns manning the wall. Mother told me that the voice of Ruolu the Elder was loud and crisp, almost metallic. ‘Fellow villagers,’ he said, ‘a people united in spirit can move Mount Tai. Only if we’re united in spirit can we keep the Japs out of our village!’
As he was speaking, a shot rang out from the farmland beyond the village, and an elderly watchman’s head exploded; he rocked back and forth, then tumbled off the wall, sending the villagers scurrying for cover. Ruolu the Elder, dressed in tight pants and shirt, stood in the middle of the road and shouted, ‘Fellow villagers, calm down! Mount the wall as we planned! Don’t be afraid to die. Those who fear death will find it, those who don’t will live on! Our lives are all that stand between the Japs and our village!’
Mother watched the men run to the wall and throw themselves down on their bellies. My maternal grandmother, whose knees were knocking, was frozen to the spot. ‘Beauty’s dad,’ she shouted tearfully, ‘what about the children?’ My maternal grandfather ran back to her, rifle in hand, and lashed out, ‘What are you wailing about? Now that it’s come to this, it makes no difference whether we live or die!’ She didn’t dare utter a sound, but the tears kept flowing. He turned to look at the village wall, which hadn’t yet come under fire, grabbed Mother with one hand and her brother with the other, and ran with them to the vegetable garden behind the house, where there was an old abandoned well, its rickety windlass still in place. He looked down into the well and said, ‘Since there’s no water, we’ll hide the children here for the time being. We can come back for them after we’ve driven the Japs off.’ Grandmother stood like a block of wood and bowed to his wishes.
Grandfather took the loose end of rope from the windlass and tied it around my mother’s waist, just as a shriek split the sky above them and a howling black object crashed into the neighbour’s pigsty. There was an ear-splitting explosion, and everything seemed to disintegrate as a column of smoke rose from the sty; pieces of shrapnel, patches of dung, and chunks of pig flew in all directions. A stumpy leg fell right in front of Mother, the white tendons all curled inward like river leeches. It was the first mortar explosion my fifteen-year-old mother had ever heard. The surviving pigs squealed frantically and came dashing
out of the sty; Mother and my little uncle were crying hysterically.
‘They’re firing mortars!’ Grandfather announced. ‘Beauty, you’re fifteen now, so you’ll have to take care of your brother down in the well. I’ll come back for you after the Japs are gone.’ As another mortar shell exploded in the village, he cranked the windlass and lowered Mother into the well. When her feet touched the broken bricks and crumbling clay at the bottom, she looked up at the ray of light far above her, barely able to make out Grandfather’s face. ‘Untie the rope,’ she heard him yell. After doing as she was told, she watched the rope rise jerkily up the well. She could hear her parents arguing, the exploding Jap mortar shells, and finally the sound of her mother crying. Grandfather’s face reappeared in the ray of light. ‘Beauty,’ he shouted, ‘here comes your brother. Make sure you catch him.’
Mother observed the wailing descent of my three-year-old uncle, his arms and legs flailing. The rotting piece of rope quivered in the air; the windlass protested with long-drawn-out creaks. Grandmother leaned into the well opening until nearly all the upper half of her body was in view; sobbing uncontrollably, she called out my uncle’s name: ‘Harmony, my little Harmony . . .’ Mother watched Grandmother’s glistening tears fall like crystal beads to the bottom of the well. The rope played out as Little Uncle’s feet touched the bottom, where he tearfully implored his mother, ‘Ma, pull me up, I don’t, I don’t want to be down here, I want to stay with you, Ma, Ma.’