Red Sorghum

by Mo Yan

  A young man with three fountain pens in his coat pocket walked over and said coolly, ‘What’s all the racket about, old-timer?’

  Seeing all those pens in the young man’s pocket, he assumed he’d caught the attention of a ranking official, so he knelt down in the snow, grabbed hold of two metal ribs in the gate, and said tearfully, ‘Eminent leader, the production-brigade branch secretary has held back my grain rations. I haven’t eaten for three days, I’m starving, eighteen stabs by the Japs didn’t kill me, now I’m going to starve to death. . . .’

  ‘What village are you from?’ the young man asked him.

  ‘Don’t you know me, eminent leader?’ he asked. ‘I’m Eighteen Stabs Geng.’

  The young man laughed. ‘How am I supposed to know you’re Eighteen Stabs Geng? Go home and see your brigade leader. The commune organisations are on holiday.’

  Old Geng banged on the metal gate for a long time, but no one else paid him any attention. Soft yellow light shone down from the windows in the compound, in front of which feathery snowflakes swirled silently. Firecrackers exploded somewhere in the village, reminding him that it was time to send off the Kitchen God to make his report in heaven. He wanted to go home, but as he took his first step he fell headlong to the ground, as though shoved. When his face hit the snow, it felt amazingly warm, reminding him of his mother’s bosom – no, it was more like his mother’s womb. His eyes were closed in the womb, where he swam in complete freedom, with no worries about food, clothes, anything. He was indescribably happy; the absence of hunger and cold brought him extreme joy.

  The golden rays of light from the commune windows and the fiery-red winter-sweet blossoms at the home of the branch secretary lit up the world like rapidly licking flames, and the glare blinded him; snowflakes swirled like gold and silver foil as each family sent off its Kitchen God on a paper horse to soar up to heaven. With all that light streaming down on him, his body felt hot and dry, as though he’d caught fire. He quickly stripped off his jacket – hot. Then he took off his padded pants – hot. Took off his padded shoes – hot. Took off his felt cap – hot. Naked, just as he had emerged from his mother’s womb – hot. He lay down in the snow, the snow scalded his skin; he rolled around in the snow – hot, so hot. He gobbled up some snow, it burned his throat as though it were filled with sunbaked pebbles of sand. Hot! So hot! Rising from the snow, he grabbed the metal ribs of the gate, but they scalded him, and he couldn’t pull his hands off the gate. The last thing he wanted to shout was: Hot! So hot!

  The young man with the pens in his pocket came out early the next morning to shovel snow. When he casually raised his head and glanced at the gate, his face paled with fright. What he saw was the old man from last night, who’d called himself Eighteen Stabs Geng, stark naked, his hands stuck to the gate, like the crucified Jesus. His face had turned purple, his limbs were spread out, his staring eyes were fixed on the commune compound; hard to believe he was a lonely old man who had died of starvation. The young man made a careful count of the scars on his body. There were eighteen, all right, no more, no less.

  8

  POCKY CHENG WAS finally set free by the Japs after leading them to all the village sandal workshops, each of which they blew up. ‘Are there any more?’ Chestnut Wool Cap asked sternly.

  ‘No,’ he asserted, ‘honest, there aren’t.’

  Chestnut Wool Cap looked over at the Japanese, who nodded. ‘Get the hell out of here!’ he said, Cheng backed up a dozen or so steps, bowing and scraping, then nodding over and over, as he spun around to get out of there as fast as his legs would carry him. But they were so rubbery, and his heart was pounding so hard, that he froze on the spot. The bayonet wound in his chest throbbed, and the mess in his crotch had turned sticky and cold. As he leaned against a tree to catch his breath, he heard ghostly sobs and screams from the houses around him. His legs buckled as he slid to the ground, his back scraping the dry, brittle bark of the tree. Clouds of smoke filled the sky above the village, the residue of exploding hand grenades, I suppose.

  After lobbing hundreds of black muskmelon grenades through overhead windows and doors, the Japanese encircled the sandal workshops while muted explosions tore them apart, making the ground tremble as thick smoke rose from the windows, accompanied by the pitiful screams of those who had survived the blasts. The Japanese soldiers then stuffed straw into the windows, muting the shrieks inside until you had to strain to hear them. With Pocky Cheng as their guide, the Japanese blew up twelve workshops. He knew that three-fourths of the village men made straw sandals and slept in those workshops, so there was little chance any of them could have survived. The enormity of his crime hit him suddenly. Without his lead, the Japanese would never have found the workshop in the remote corner of the eastern section of the village; it was one of the biggest, employing twenty or thirty men, who spent their nights there weaving sandals and joking with one another. The Japanese lobbed over forty grenades into that workshop alone, blasting the roof off the building, which, following the last explosion, became a flattened graveyard. A single willow pole that had supported the roof stood alone in the mud like a rifle barrel pointing to the crimson sky.

  He was afraid. He was racked with guilt. All around, familiar, newly dead faces denounced him. He began to defend himself: The Japs forced me at bayonet-point. If I hadn’t led the way, they’d have found the workshops on their own. The murdered villagers glanced at one another in stupefaction, then left quietly. As he gazed at their mangled bodies, he felt like a man soaking in an icy pool, freezing inside and out.

  After dragging himself home, Pocky Cheng discovered his beautiful wife and thirteen-year-old daughter lying in the yard, naked, their intestines spread out around them. Everything turned black, and he keeled over. He felt dead one minute, alive the next. He was running after something, heading southwest. A red oval cloud floated in the rosy southwest sky, where his wife, his daughter, and hordes of villagers were standing, men and women, young and old. He ran as though his feet had wings, chasing the slow-moving cloud, his face raised skyward. The people in the cloud spat at him, even his wife and daughter. He hastily defended himself, but the spittle continued to rain down on him. He watched the cloud rise higher and higher in the sky, until it turned into a bright, blood-red dot.

  For his beautiful, fair-skinned young wife, marrying a man with pockmarks had been a disgrace. But at the village inn he played his woodwind every night, making it weep and cry, and nearly breaking her heart. It was his woodwind she’d married. Over and over he played it, until she grew tired of it; and his pocked face, which had repulsed her from the very beginning, now became unbearable. So she ran off with a fabric peddlar, but Pocky Cheng went after her and dragged her back spanking her until her buttocks were swollen and puffy: a battered wife, kneaded dough. From then on, she put her heart and soul into domesticity. First she had a little girl, then a little boy, who was now eight. Regaining his senses, Pocky went looking for the boy, and found him, stuffed in the water vat, head down, feet up, his body as rigid as a pole.

  Pocky Cheng tied a rope to the top of the door frame, made a noose in the end, then stood on a stool, stuck his head through the noose, and kicked the stool out from under himself. A teenage boy happening on him reached up with his knife and cut the rope in two. Pocky Cheng crashed to the ground.

  ‘Uncle Pocky!’ the boy fumed. ‘Haven’t the Japanese killed enough of us? Why do their job for them? You can’t get revenge unless you’re alive!’

  Pocky Cheng complained tearfully to the boy, ‘Chunsheng, your auntie, Little Orchid, Little Pillar, they’re all dead. My whole family’s gone!’

  Chunsheng walked into the yard, knife in hand, and when he returned his face was as white as a sheet and his eyes were red. ‘Uncle,’ he said as he helped Pocky Cheng to his feet, ‘let’s join the Jiao-Gao regiment! They’re at the village of Two Counties recruiting soldiers and buying horses right now.’

  ‘But my house, my belongings?’ Pocky Cheng said.<
br />
  ‘You crazy old man! You just tried to hang yourself. Who’d have got your house and belongings then? Let’s go!’

  It was especially cold in the early spring of 1940. All the villages in Northeast Gaomi Township lay in ruins. Those who had survived were like marmots in burrows. The powerful Jiao-Gao Regiment was beset by the miseries of hunger and cold. From commander to common foot-soldier, the gaunt, thin men all shivered in their unlined jackets. After making camp in a tiny village not far from Saltwater Gap, they lay atop the battered wall when the sun came out, to pick lice off their bodies and soak up the midday heat. All day long they conserved their energy; then, at night, they nearly froze in the cold. They were afraid that if they weren’t killed by the Japs the weather would do them in.

  Pocky Cheng was their most fearless fighter, a lionhearted man who had earned the complete trust of the commander, Little Foot Jiang. Hand grenades were his weapons of choice. In battle he would rush to the front line, close his eyes, and hurl one grenade after another at the enemy. Even if they were only six or seven yards away, he refused to take cover; yet, strange as it sounds, with shrapnel flying around him like locusts, he was never hit.

  Commander Jiang called a meeting of officers to grapple with the problems of cold and hunger. Pocky Cheng rashly burst in on them, a stern look on his face. ‘What do you think we should do, Old Cheng?’ Little Foot Jiang asked him.

  Pocky Cheng held his tongue.

  A bookish squad leader volunteered, ‘Holing up here in Northeast Gaomi Township is the same as waiting to die. We should go to the cotton factories in Southern Jiao County to get some clothes. And since there’s plenty of yams there, food won’t be a problem, either.’

  Commander Jiang took a mimeographed newspaper from his shirt and said, ‘According to news reports, the situation in Southern Jiao is grimmer than here. The rail brigade was wiped out by the Japanese. By comparison, Northeast Gaomi Township is ideal for guerrilla activity. The land is broad, the villages are few and far between, and the Japanese and their puppet troops are weaker here. Since most of last year’s sorghum crop hasn’t been harvested, we have more places to hide. All we have to do is solve the problems of food and clothing. The chance to attack the enemy will come as long as we stick it out.’

  A gaunt-faced officer said, ‘Where are we going to find any cloth? Or cotton wadding? Or food? Except for sorghum that’s sprouting buds, we’ve got nothing to eat. And that alone could wind up killing us! I say we pretend to surrender to the puppet-regiment commander, Zhang Zhuxi. That way, we could get our hands on some lined clothes and stock up on ammo, then pull out.’

  The bookish squad leader jumped angrily to his feet. ‘You want us to become a bunch of traitors?’

  The officer defended himself: ‘Who asked you to become a traitor? I said pretend to surrender! Back in the Three Kingdoms period, that’s what Jiang Wei did, and so did Huang Gai!’

  ‘We’re resistance fighters. We don’t bow our heads when we’re starving, and we don’t bend our knees when we’re freezing. Anybody who wants to give allegiance to the invader and cast off his moral courage will do so over my dead body!’

  Not to be intimidated, the other officer said, ‘Is the mission of resistance fighters to starve or freeze? No, we must be flexible and resourceful. Tolerance must be one of our stratagems. The only way we’ll win this war of resistance is by conserving our strength.’

  ‘Comrades,’ Commander Jiang said, ‘that’s enough bickering. If you have something to say, take your turn.’

  ‘I’ve got a plan, Commander,’ Pocky Cheng spoke up.

  When Little Foot Jiang heard Pocky Cheng’s plan, he rubbed his hands in delight and complimented him profusely.

  On the night when Pocky Cheng’s plan was implemented by the Jiao-Gao regiment, they ran off with over a hundred dogskins my father and granddad had nailed to the crumbling village walls, and stole the rifles Granddad had hidden in the dry well. Having carried out this phase of their plan, they went out to hunt dogs for some needed nutrition, as well as the warmth of the skins.

  That spring, as a freezing cold settled over the land, there appeared in the broad expanse of Northeast Gaomi Township an army of intrepid ‘dog soldiers’ who fought a dozen or more battles, major and minor, with the Japanese and their puppets. That included Zhang Zhuxi’s Twenty-eighth Battalion, who trembled in their boots whenever they heard the barking of dogs.

  The first battle occurred on the second day of the second month, by the old calendar – the day, according to legend, when the dragon raises its head. The Jiao-Gao regiment, dogskins draped over their shoulders and rifles in their hands, slipped into Ma Family Hamlet, where they surrounded the Ninth Company of Zhang Zhuxi’s Twenty-eighth Battalion and a squad of Japanese soldiers. The enemy’s headquarters was in Ma Family Hamlet’s onetime elementary school, which consisted of four rows of blue-tiled buildings surrounded by a high wall of blue bricks and barbed wire.

  The commander of the puppet Ninth Company was a brutal man from Northeast Gaomi with a deceptively gentle smile. Since the onset of winter, he had begun a campaign to accumulate bricks, stones, and lumber to build new quarters for his company. As a result, his personal worth, all of it ill-gotten, increased dramatically. The locals despised him.

  Ma Family Hamlet was in the northwest corner of Jiao County, bordering on Northeast Gaomi Township, about thirty li from the Jiao-Gao regiment headquarters. The two hundred Jiao-Gao soldiers waited until nightfall to set out from the village, dogskins draped over their shoulders, fur on the outside, tails dragging between their legs, and the multicoloured fur shining brightly in the fading sunlight. It was a beautiful, bizarre army of underworld demons on the march.

  Their commander, Little Foot Jiang, wore a huge red dogskin – it had to have been Red, the dog from our family – and as he walked at the head of his troops, the fur on his pelt waved in the wind. The bag hanging over Pocky Cheng’s chest was stuffed with twenty-eight hand grenades.

  Cold stars filled the night sky when they slipped into Ma Family Hamlet. A couple of dogs barked in friendly welcome, and a mischievous young soldier answered them in kind. An order from the front swept through their ranks: No more barking! No barking! No barking!

  They took up positions a hundred yards outside the main gate, where bricks and rocks were piled in readiness for springtime construction.

  ‘Pocky,’ Little Foot Jiang said to Pocky Cheng, who was sticking close to him, ‘let’s get moving!’

  ‘Number Six, Chunsheng, you two follow me,’ Pocky whispered.

  He removed the bag of hand grenades to lighten his load. After tucking one grenade in his waistband, he handed the bag to a tall soldier and said, ‘When we’ve made it to the gate, bring this to me.’

  With stars spreading their weak light over the ground and a dozen or so lit carriage lanterns hanging from the barracks, it looked like dusk in the compound. Two puppet sentries patrolled the gateway, casting long shadows on the ground. An ageing black dog ran out from behind the piles of bricks and stones, followed by a white dog, then a spotted one. They snarled and rolled on the ground, their profiles merging as they approached the gateway. In the shadows of a woodpile no more than a dozen paces from the gate, the dogfight turned nasty. From a distance it looked like three mutts fighting over a choice morsel of food.

  Commander Little Foot Jiang watched the masterful performance conceived by Pocky Cheng, and was reminded of the benumbed, cowardly man who had shown up to join the army, snivelling at the drop of a hat, like a useless old woman. Pocky and his comrades continued their dogfight ruse in the shadows as the distracted sentries stood shoulder to shoulder and listened. One picked up a rock and threw it at the dogs. ‘Mangy damned mutts!’

  Pocky Cheng yelped like a dog hit by a rock, and Commander Jiang had to stifle a laugh, it sounded so much like the real thing. The Jiao-Gao soldiers had been practising their barking since the assault plan for Ma Family Hamlet was first drawn up. Pocky Chen
g, a Peking-opera buff and woodwind player, had wonderful breath control and a loud, booming voice, not to mention a lively tongue; he easily became the regiment’s champion ‘dog’.

  Growing impatient, the sentries moved cautiously up to the woodpile, where the dogs were really getting into it. Rifles ready, bayonets fixed, they were only three or four steps from the woodpile when the dogs stopped barking and began to whine, as though afraid.

  The sentries advanced another slow, cautious step.

  Pocky Cheng, Number Six, and Chunsheng jumped up, fur shimmering in the dim yellow glow, and charged the sentries like bolts of lightning. Pocky Cheng smashed his grenade down on the head of one; Number Six and Chunsheng buried their bayonets in the other’s chest. Both crashed to the ground like sacks of cement.

  The Jiao-Gao soldiers looked like a frenzied pack of dogs as they charged the enemy barracks. Pocky Cheng, who had retrieved his bag of hand grenades, ran like a madman towards the tiled buildings.

  Rifle fire, exploding grenades, shouts, and the screams of Japs and their puppet allies shattered the winter calm at Ma Family Hamlet. The local dogs were barking like crazy.

  Pocky Cheng lobbed twenty grenades into a window, and the pathetic cries of the Japanese inside reminded him of the day years earlier when they had hurled their grenades into the sandal workshops. But instead of satisfying his sense of vengeance, this re-enacted scene caused him such anguish that his heart felt as though it were being sliced open.