Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

by Mo Yan

  Now, given my body weight and the fact that I was carrying Little Flower on my back, although I too went skyward at that juncture, I started falling back before I was ten feet out of the water, and it was only the springy nature of the scrub brush that kept either of us from injury. We were, of course, too large for the foxes to consider eating; and to the wild boars, with their well-developed front halves and tapered rear ends, we had to be considered relatives; they would never eat their own kin. We landed safely on the sandbar.

  Food came easily to those foxes and wild boars, good, nutritious food, and they were all much rounder than they should have been. All foxes eat fish, that’s a rule of nature. But when we saw a dozen or so wild boars dining on fish, we could hardly believe our eyes. They’d grown so picky, their mouths so pampered, that they ate only the brains and the roe; the fat, rich meat held no attraction for them.

  Astounded to find us there, the wild boars slowly gathered round, mean looks in their eyes, moonlight glinting off their terrifying white fangs. Little Flower wrapped her legs around me even tighter, and I could feel that she was quaking. I started backing up, backing up, not giving these brutes the chance to fan out and surround us. I counted them, there were nine altogether, male and female, all weighing at least two hundred jin. They had long, hard, stupid-looking snouts, pointed wolflike ears, and spiky bristles; their oily black skin showed how well-fed they all were, and the smell they emitted spoke to their raw, wild power. At the time I weighed five hundred jin and was as big as a rowboat. Having come from and through the human, donkey, and ox realms, I was both smart and strong, and none of them would have been a match for me, one-on-one. But in a fight with nine at the same time, I stood no chance. All I could think at the moment was back up, keep backing up, all the way to the water’s edge, where I could let Little Flower swim safely away. Then I’d turn and fight with all the wit and courage I possessed. After dining on an exclusive diet of fish brains and roe, these animals’ intelligence was nearly on a par with foxes, so they were probably not going to be fooled by my strategy. I spotted two of the boars move around behind me so they could surround me before I reached the water. I realized that retreat was a dead-end street, that it was time to go on the offensive, to feint to the east and attack to the west in order to break through the encirclement and flee to the expansive center of the river sandbar. I needed to adapt Mao Zedong’s guerrilla tactic of forcing changes in their formation and attack their weaknesses. I signaled Little Flower to let her know what I was planning.

  “My king,” she said softly, “go on, don’t worry about me.” “I can’t do that,” I said. “We’re in this together, like brother and sister. Where I am is where you’ll be.”

  I charged the male that was launching a frontal attack. He wobbled and started to back up, but I abruptly changed directly and headed toward a nearby female. When our heads hit, it sounded like the crash of broken pottery, and I was treated to the view of her body tumbling backward at least ten feet. Now the circle had been rent, but I could hear the snorts from their noses behind me. With a swinish yell, I ran like the wind toward the southeast. But when I realized that Little Flower was not behind me, I put on the brakes and spun around to wait for her to catch up. But poor Little Flower, dear Little Flower, the only one willing to escape with me, loyal Little Flower, had been bitten on the rump by a savage male wild boar; her screams of pain and terror blanched the moon. “Let her go!” I roared as I charged the offending boar.

  “My king,” she yelled, “go on, don’t worry about me.”

  You’ve listened to me this far, and I’d be surprised if you weren’t deeply moved or if you didn’t see our actions — pigs or not — as noble. Well, that boar held on and continued his savage attack. Her cries nearly drove me crazy. Nearly? Hell, I was crazy. But a pair of males ran up and blocked my way, keeping me from rescuing Little Flower. Abandoning all battle strategies and tactics, I charged one of them, who didn’t get out of the way fast enough to avoid getting bitten in the neck. I felt my teeth bite through his thick skin and sink all the way down to bone. He rolled over and got away, leaving me with a mouth filled with rank-tasting blood and spiky bristles. Meanwhile, the second boar ran up and bit my hind leg. I kicked out like a mule — a trick I’d learned as a donkey — and connected on his cheek. Then I spun around and went at him. He ran off screeching. My leg hurt like crazy; it was gushing blood, but I had no time to worry about that, with Little Flower being ravaged by that other bastard. I jumped up with a loud war whoop and charged. When I hit the bastard I felt his innards rip and tear, and he was dead before he hit the ground. Little Flower was still alive, but barely. As I picked her up, her innards tumbled out of the wound in her belly I didn’t know what to do about all that steamy, slippery, foul-smelling stuff. I was helpless, helpless and heartbroken.

  “Little Flower, my darling Little Flower, I failed you . . .”

  She struggled to open her eyes. A blue and white, and very bleak, gaze emerged.

  “My king,” she managed to say as saliva and blood seeped from her mouth, “would it be all right... if I call you Big Brother instead?”

  “Yes, of course,” I replied through my tears. “My little sister, the closest person in the world to me . . .”

  “I’m so lucky . . . Big Brother ... so very lucky . . .” She stopped breathing and her legs stiffened, like four little clubs.

  “Little Sister!” I was weeping as I stood up and walked straight toward the remaining boars, determined to fight them to the death — my death.

  They formed up and, fearful but disciplined, began backing off. When I charged, they spread out to surround me. Abandoning tactics altogether, I butted here, bit there, and fought like a mad pig, wounding them all and getting my share of wounds in the process. When the shifting battle lines brought us to the middle of the river sandbar, to the edge of a row of abandoned military structures, with roof tiles and crumbling walls, I saw a familiar figure seated beside a stone feeding trough half buried in mud.

  “Old Diao, is that you?” I shouted in amazement.

  “I knew you’d come one day, my brother,” Diao Xiaosan said before turning to the approaching wild boars. “I cannot be your king. This is your true king!”

  After a momentary hesitation, they fell to their knees and, with their snouts in the dirt, announced in unison:

  “Long live the great king!”

  I was about to say something, but with this latest development, what could I say? So, in a state of utter bewilderment, I became king of the sandbar wild boars and received their fealty. As for the human king, the one sitting on the moon, he had already flown off millions of miles from earth, and the gargantuan moon had shrunk down to the size of a silver platter, so small and far away that I could no longer have seen the human king, even with a high-powered telescope.

  33

  Pig Sixteen Has Thoughts of Home

  A Drunk Hong Taiyue Raises Hell in a Public House

  “Time flies.” Before I knew it, I was entering my fifth year as king of the boars on this desolate and virtually uninhabited sandbar.

  At first, I’d planned to implement a system of monogamous relationships, as practiced in civilized human society, and had assumed that this reform measure would be greeted with cheers of approval. Imagine my surprise when, instead, it was met with strong opposition, not only by the females but also by the males, who grumbled their dissatisfaction, even though they would have been the primary beneficiaries. Not knowing how to resolve the issue, I took my problem to Diao Xiaosan, who was sprawled in the straw shed we’d provided to protect him from the elements.

  “You can abdicate if you want,” he said coldly. “But if you plan to stay on as king, you’ll have to respect local customs.”

  My hooves were tied. I had no choice but to let stand this cruel jungle practice. So I shut my eyes and fantasized images of Little Flower, of Butterfly Lover, and, less clearly, of a female donkey, even the hazy outline of some women, as I ma
ted almost recklessly with all those female wild boars. I avoided it whenever possible and cut corners when avoidance was out of the question, but as the years passed, the sandbar population was increased by dozens of wildly colorful little bastards. Some had golden yellow bristles, others had black, and some were spotted like those dalmatians you see in TV ads. Most of them retained their wild boar physical characteristics, but they were clearly smarter than their mothers.

  In 1981, during the fourth lunar month, when the apricot trees were blooming and the female wild boars were in heat, I swam over to the south bank of the river. The water was warm on the surface, but icy cold below, and at the point where the warm and cold water met, I encountered schools of fish swimming upstream against the current. I was deeply moved by their indomitable desire to return to their spawning grounds, whatever the difficulty, however great the sacrifice. Moving over to shallow water, I became lost in my own thoughts as I stood and watched them struggling heroically ahead, their fins flapping.

  Suddenly I was struck by an outlandish thought — actually it was more like an urgent internal desire, to travel back to Ximen Village, as if I had an appointment made years before, one virtually impossible to reschedule.

  It had already been four years since I’d paired up with Little Flower and fled from the pig farm, but I could have found the way back there blindfolded, in part because the fragrance of apricot blossoms came to me on winds from the west but mainly because it was my home. So I struck out, walking along the narrow but comfortably smooth bank of the river, heading west. Uncultivated fields stretched out south of me, nothing but scrubland to the north.

  When I reached the one-point-six-acre plot belonging to Lan Lian, I planted my hooves in the ground, having chased the moon westward to my destination. I looked off to the south, where Ximen Village Production Brigade land surrounding Lan Lian’s tiny strip was blanketed with mulberry trees, under whose lush foliage women were picking mulberries in the moonlight, and the sight stirred my emotions. I could see there were changes in farming villages following the death of Mao Zedong. Lan Lian was still planting an old variety of wheat, but the mulberry trees all around him were sapping the soil of nutrients, having an obvious effect on at least four rows of his cultivated land, with anemic stalks and tassels as tiny as houseflies. Maybe this was another scheme Hong Taiyue had dreamed up to punish Lan Lian: Let’s see how an independent farmer deals with this. By the light of the moon I saw the bare back of someone digging a ditch beside the mulberry trees, waging a battle against the People’s Commune. He was digging a deep, narrow ditch on the land between his and the mulberry plots belonging to the production brigade and chopping off the yellow mulberry roots that crossed that line with his hoe. That could have been a problem; on your own land you could dig as you wanted. But cutting the roots of brigade trees was considered destruction of property belonging to the collective. My mind was a blank as I gazed at old Lan Lian, bent over like a black bear clumsily digging away. Once the mulberries on both sides were tall, mature trees, the independent farmer would be the owner of a tract of barren land. But I soon learned how wrong I was. By this time, the production brigade had broken up and the People’s Commune existed in name only. Agricultural reform had entered the land-parceling phase, and the land surrounding Lan Lian’s plot had been distributed to individual farmers, who could decide on their own whether to plant mulberries or wheat.

  My legs carried me to the Apricot Garden Pig Farm. The apricot tree was still there, but the pigpens weren’t. The spot where I had once sprawled lazily to daydream was now planted with peanuts. I rose up on my hind legs and rested my front hooves on branches of the tree I’d practiced on every day as a young pig. It was immediately clear that I was a lot heavier and clumsier than I’d been back then, and I was obviously out of practice where standing upright was concerned. In sum, as I roamed the ground of the onetime pig farm, I couldn’t help feeling nostalgic, which in itself was a sure sign that I was well ensconced in middle age. Yes, I’d experienced a great deal of what the world had to offer a pig.

  I discovered that the two rows of buildings that had served as dormitories and workplaces for personnel who prepared our food had been converted to the task of raising silkworms. The sight of all those bright lights told me that Ximen Village had been added to the national electricity grid. And there, in front of a wide array of silkworm racks, stood Ximen Bai, her hair white as snow. She was bent over, the willow basket in her hands nearly filled with mulberry leaves, which she was spreading over the white silkworm beds. Crunching noises rose into the air. Your wedding suite, I noted, had also been converted to silkworm raising, which meant that you’d been given new quarters.

  I stepped onto the road that ran through the center of the village; only now it was paved and probably twice as wide as before. The squat rammed-earth walls on either side had been taken down and had given way to rows of identical buildings with red-tile roofs. North of the road stood a two-story building fronted by an open square in which a hundred or more people — mostly old women and children — were watching an episode of a TV drama on a twenty-one-inch Matsushita Japanese television set.

  I observed the crowd of TV watchers for about ten minutes before continuing on, heading west. You know where I was going. But now I needed to stay off the road. Causing the death of Xu Bao had made me a household name throughout Northeast Gaomi Township, and there’d be hell to pay if they spotted me. I wasn’t worried that I couldn’t hold my own if it came to that, but I wanted to avoid anything that might involve innocent bystanders. In other words, I was afraid, not of them, but of causing trouble. By staying in the shadows of the buildings south of the road, I was able to make it unobserved to the Ximen family compound.

  The gate was open; the old apricot stood there as always, its branches covered with fresh blossoms that filled the air with their fragrance. I stayed in the shadows and gazed in at eight tables with plastic tablecloths. A light that had been strung outside and hung from a branch of the apricot tree lit the compound up like daytime. I knew the people who were sitting at the tables. A bad lot, all of them. The onetime puppet security chief Yu Wufu, the turncoat Zhang Dazhuang, Tian Gui the landlord, and the rich peasant Wu Yuan were seated at one table. Seated at one of the other tables were the onetime chief of security Yang Qi and two of the Sun brothers, Dragon and Tiger. The tables were littered with the leavings of a banquet; the guests were already good and drunk. I later learned that Yang Qi was in the business of selling bamboo poles — he’d never been much of a farmer — which he purchased in Jinggangshan and transported to Gaomi by train and from there to Ximen Village by truck. He sold his entire first load to Ma Liangcai, who used the poles to build a new school. Almost overnight Yang Qi became a wealthy man. Sitting there as the village’s richest man, he was dressed in a gray suit with a bright red tie. By rolling up his sleeves, he was able to show off his digital wristwatch. He took out a pack of American cigarettes and tossed one to Dragon Sun, who was gnawing on a braised pig’s foot, and another to Tiger Sun, who was wiping his mouth with a napkin. He crumpled the empty pack, turned, and shouted toward the east-side room:

  “Boss lady!”

  The boss lady came running outside. What do you know, it was her, Wu Qiuxiang! Would you believe it, Boss Lady? That was when I noticed that the wall just east of the compound gate had been whitewashed to accommodate a sign in red: Qiuxiang Tavern. Wu Qiuxiang, the proprietress of Qiuxiang Tavern, ran up to where Yang Qi was sitting. Her smiling face was heavily powdered; she had a towel over one shoulder and a blue apron around her waist — obviously a shrewd, competent, enthusiastic, professional innkeeper. This was a different world — reforms and openings to the outside world had brought profound changes to Ximen Village. Qiuxiang was all smiles as she asked Yang Qi:

  “What can I do for you, Boss Yang?”

  “Don’t call me that,” Yang said with a glare. “I’m just a peddler of bamboo poles, not the boss of anything.”

  “
Don’t be modest, Boss Yang. At ten yuan apiece, the sale of ten thousand makes you a wealthy man. If you’re not a boss, then there can’t be a soul in Northeast Gaomi Township worthy of the title.” Matching her exaggerated compliment with a touch on Yang’s shoulder, Qiuxiang continued. “Just look at how you’re dressed. What you’re wearing had to cost at least a thousand.”

  “You women, open your bloody mouths and out comes the flattery At this rate, you’ll won’t be happy until I explode like one of those bloated dead pigs back on the pig farm.”

  “Okay, Boss Yang, you’re not worth a thing, a pauper, does that sound better to you? You close the door on me before I have a chance to ask for a loan. Now then,” Qiuxiang said with a pout, “what can I get for you?”

  “Huh? Are you mad at me? Don’t pout like that, it gives me a hard-on.”

  “To hell with you!” Qiuxiang fired back, slapping Yang Qi on the head with her greasy towel. “Now tell me, what do you want?”

  “A pack of cigarettes. Good Friends.”

  “That’s all? What about liquor?” With a quick glance at the red faces of Tiger and Dragon Sun, she said, “These brothers look to be in dire need of a drink.”