by Mo Yan
With a flick of its tail, the goat walked away casually. Tears gushed from my eyes. My mouth was filled with a muttony taste, and I felt like throwing up. But my mouth was also filled with the taste of buttery grass and daisies, and so I stopped feeling like throwing up. Sixth Sister pulled me to my feet and ran in a circle with me in her arms. I saw freckles pop up all over her face; her eyes were like black stones dredged up from the bottom of a river, clean and bright. “My foolish little brother,” she said excitedly, “this will be your salvation …”
“Mother,” Sixth Sister shouted, “Mother, Jintong drank goat’s milk! He drank goat’s milk!”
The sound of clapping emerged from inside.
Mother tossed the blood-stained rolling pin down next to the wok, opened her mouth wide, and gasped for breath, her chest rising and falling violently. Shangguan Lü lay beside the haystack, a crack in her skull looking like a walnut. Eighth Sister, Yunü, was huddled near the stove, a piece of her ear missing, seemingly gnawed off by a rat, and still oozing blood. The blood stained her cheek and her neck. She was bawling loudly, a steady flow of tears emerging from her sightless eyes.
“Mother, you killed Grandma!” Sixth Sister shrieked in horror.
Mother reached out and touched Grandma’s wound with her fingers, and then, as if given an electric shock, sat down hard on the ground.
2
As specially invited guests, we climbed the southeastern edge of the grassy slope on Reclining Ox Mountain to watch a demonstration by Commander Sima Ku and the young American Babbitt. A southeastern wind swept past under sunny skies as Laidi and I rode a single donkey up the mountain; Zhaodi and Sima Liang shared another one. I sat in front of Laidi, who held me from behind. Zhaodi sat in front of Sima Liang, who merely held on to her clothes, since he couldn’t wrap his arms around her belly, in which the next generation of Simas was growing. Our contingent skirted the ox’s tail and gradually climbed onto the ox’s back, where needle-sharp grass dotted with yellow dandelions grew. Even with us on their backs, the donkeys climbed effortlessly.
Sima Ku and Babbitt rode past us on horseback, excitement showing on their faces. Sima Ku waved a fist at us as he passed. At the crest of the mountain, a group of yellow-skinned people shouted down the mountain. Sima Ku raised his riding crop and smacked the rump of his horse. The horse responded by climbing even faster, with Babbitt’s horse following close behind. He rode horses the same way he rode camels, his upper body straight no matter how much he swayed from side to side. His legs were so long that his stirrups nearly touched the ground, and his horse was both to be pitied and laughed at; but it galloped along nonetheless.
“Let’s speed up a bit,” Second Sister said as she dug her heels into the donkey’s midsection. She was the head of our delegation, the esteemed wife of the commander, and no one dared disobey her. Representatives of the masses and some local celebrities followed without a word of complaint, though they were out of breath from the climb. The donkey carrying Laidi and me was right on the tail of the one carrying Zhaodi and Sima Liang; Laidi’s nipples rubbed against my back through the black cloth of her dress, which took me back to the episode in the feeding trough, and brought me great pleasure.
The wind on the mountaintop was stronger than lower down, so strong in fact that the windsock snapped loudly, its red and yellow silk ribbons dancing wildly, like a pheasant’s tail feathers. A dozen or so soldiers were unloading things from the backs of camels, scowling beasts whose tails and rear leg joints were soiled by dried excrement. The rich pastureland of Northeast Gaomi had fattened up Commander Sima’s horses and donkeys and the locals’ cows and goats, but had had the opposite effect on the dozen or so pitiful camels, who were slow to acclimate to the place; their rumps seemed chiseled by awls, their legs were like kindling; their normally tall and angular humps looked like empty sacks hanging to one side, about to fall to the ground.
The soldiers unrolled an enormous carpet and laid it on the grass. “Lift the commander’s wife down off her donkey!” Sima Ku ordered. Soldiers ran up and lifted the pregnant Zhaodi off her donkey, and then helped Sima Liang down. After that it was the commander’s sister-in-law, Laidi, his brother-in-law, Jintong, and his younger sister-in-law, Yunii. As honored guests, we sat on the carpet. Everyone else stood behind us. The Bird Fairy tried to hide in the crowd, and when Second Sister signaled her to come over, she hid her face behind Sima Ting and stood behind us. Sima Ting, who was suffering from a toothache, stood there covering his swollen cheek with his hand.
The spot where we sat corresponded to the ox’s head, the face directly in front of us. The ox made a point of sticking its mouth up against the chest. Its face was a hanging cliff well over a thousand feet above sea level. Winds swept over our heads on their way to the village, above which misty clouds floated like puffs of smoke. I tried to locate our house, but what I spotted was Sima Ku’s neatly laid-out compound, with its seven entrances. The church bell tower and the wooden watchtower appeared small and fragile. The plain, the river, the lake, and the pastureland were ringed by a dozen or more ponds and populated by a herd of horses the size of goats and donkeys as small as dogs; they were the Sima Battalion mounts. There were six milk goats the size of rabbits, and those were our goats — the big white one was mine. Mother had requested it from Second Sister, who had requested it from her husband’s aide-de-camp, who had sent someone to the Yi-Meng mountain district to buy it. A little girl stood next to my goat; her head looked like a little ball. But I knew it was a young woman, not a little girl, and that her head was actually a lot bigger than a little ball, because it was Sixth Sister, Niandi. She had taken the goats out to pasture, not for their benefit, but because she wanted to see the demonstration too.
Sima Ku and Babbitt had dismounted; their squat horses were roaming around the ox’s head, searching for wild alfalfa, with its purple flowers. Babbitt walked up to the ledge and leaned over to look down, as if gauging its height. Then he looked up into the sky — nothing but blue as far as the eye could see, so no problem there. He squinted and raised a hand, apparently checking the force of the wind, even though the flag was snapping, our clothes billowed, and a hawk was being tossed around in the air like a dead leaf. Sima Ku was behind him, exaggeratedly repeating all his moves. He had the same serious look on his face, but I sensed it was all for show.
‘Okay,” Babbitt said stiffly, “we can begin.”
“Okay,” Sima Ku said in the same tone. “We can begin.”
The soldiers brought up two bundles and opened one of them. Inside was a sheet of white silk that seemed bigger than the sky itself; attached to it were some white cords. Babbitt signaled the soldiers to tie the cords around Sima Ku’s hips and chest. Once that was done, he tugged at them to make sure they were well fastened. He then shook out the white silk and had the soldiers stretch it out as far as it would go. As a gust of wind caught it, the soldiers let go, and it billowed out into a sweeping arc, pulling all the cords taut and dragging Sima Ku along the ground. He tried to stand, but couldn’t, and began rolling along the ground like a newborn donkey. Babbitt ran up behind him and grabbed the cord around his back. “Grab it,” he shouted stiffly, “grab the control cord.” Sima Ku, apparently coming to his senses, cursed, “Babbitt, you fucking assassin —”
Second Sister jumped up from the carpet and ran after Sima Ku. But she hadn’t gone more than a few steps before he was swept over the ledge, bringing an abrupt end to his curses. Babbitt roared, “Pull the cord on your left! Pull it, stupid!”
We ran over to the ledge, even Eighth Sister, who stumbled in the general direction until First Sister grabbed her. The sheet of silk by then had been transformed into a puffy white cloud, drifting along at an angle, with Sima Ku hanging beneath it, twisting and turning like a fish on a hook.
Babbitt roared, “Steady, stupid, steady! Get yourself ready to touch down!”
The cloud drifted along with the wind, descending slowly until it came to earth on a distant gr
assy spot, where it was transformed into a dazzling white cover over the green grass.
All that time, we stood on the edge holding our breath, mouths open, as we followed the white sheet with our eyes until it touched the ground; then we closed our mouths and recommenced breathing. But we quickly tensed up as we became aware that Second Sister was crying. It suddenly occurred to me that the commander had fallen to his death. Everyone’s eyes were riveted on the patch of white, waiting for a miracle. Which is what we got: the sheet stirred and began to rise; a black object squirmed out from under it and stood up. He waved his arms; his excited shouts reached us on the mountaintop. A roar went up from the ledge.
Babbitt’s face was bright red; the tip of his nose shone, as if smeared with oil. After tying his cords around him and strapping the bundle onto his back, he stood, limbered up his arms, and walked slowly backward. We couldn’t take our eyes off him, but he was oblivious to his surroundings, eyes straight ahead. After he’d backed up a dozen yards or more, he stopped and closed his eyes; his lips were moving, as if he were uttering a charm. The charm completed, he opened his eyes and took off running. When he reached the spot where we were standing, he dove into the air, body straight, and began falling like a stone. For a moment, I was caught up in the illusion that he wasn’t falling, but that the ledge was actually rising, along with the ground below. Then, all of a sudden, a pure white flower, the largest I’d ever seen, blossomed in the blue sky over the green grass. A roar greeted this big white flower as it drifted along, with Babbitt hanging steadily beneath it, like the weight on a scale. He hit the ground in a matter of seconds, right in the middle of our little herd of goats, which fled in all directions, like frightened rabbits. Suddenly, the big white flower collapsed in on itself, like a bubble, covering Babbitt and the shepherdess Niandi.
Sixth Sister shrieked in alarm as a layer of white closed in around her. When her goats fled in all directions, she gazed up into the pink face of Babbitt, as he hung beneath the white cloud. He was smiling. A god descending to the land of mortals! Or so she thought. As if in a trance, she watched him fall rapidly toward her, her heart filling with reverence and ardent love for him.
The rest of us stuck our heads out over the ledge to see what was going on down below. “This has sure been an eye-opener,” said Huang Tianfu, who ran the coffin shop. “A god. I’ve lived seventy years, and I’ve finally seen a god descend to the land of mortals.” Mr. Qin the Second, who taught at the local school, stroked his goatee and sighed. “There was something special about Commander Sima the day he was born. When he was my student, I knew he was headed for big things.” Mr. Qin and Proprietor Huang were surrounded by township elders, all of whom were praising Sima Ku in similar language but different tones of voice and marveling over the eye-popping miracle that had just occurred. “You folks cannot imagine how many ways he differed from the others,” Mr. Qin said loudly to drown out the discussion around him and make a show of his special relationship with Sima Ku, a man who could fly like a bird.
A shrill noise sliced through the air from somewhere beyond the crowd; it sounded a bit like a little whelp crying for the nipple, but even more like the cries of gulls circling boats on the river, which we’d heard many years earlier. Mr. Qin the Second’s laughter stopped abruptly; the look of mirthful pride on his face vanished. We all turned to see where that strange noise had come from. It had, we discovered, come from Third Sister, Lingdi. But little of what made her “Third Sister” remained; when she uttered the strange, shrill noise that sent chills up our spines, she’d transformed almost completely into the Bird Fairy: her nose had hooked into a beak, her eyes had turned yellow, her neck had retreated into her torso, her hair had changed into feathers, and her arms were now wings, which she flapped up and down as she climbed the increasingly steep hillside, shrieking as if alone in the world and heading straight for the precipice. Sima Ting reached out to stop her, but failed, coming away with only a torn piece of cloth. By the time we snapped out of our bewilderment, she was already soaring through the air below the precipice — I prefer the word soaring to plunging. A thin green mist rose from the grass below.
Second Sister was the first to cry. The sound was disturbing. It was perfectly natural for the Bird Fairy to fly off a precipice, so what was she crying about? But then, First Sister, whom I’d always considered sneaky and cynical, began to cry. Inexplicably, even Eighth Sister, who couldn’t see a thing, joined in. Her cries sounded a bit as if she were talking in her sleep and were filled with the passion of someone seeking permission to vent her emotions. One day, long after the event, Eighth Sister confided in me that the crunch of Third Sister hitting the ground sounded to her like the shattering of glass.
The excited crowd was stupefied, faces frosted, eyes glazed. Second Sister signaled a soldier to bring over a mule, which she mounted by grabbing the animal’s short neck and swinging up onto its back. She dug her heels into the mule’s belly, sending it into an uneasy trot. Sima Liang ran after the mule, but was stopped by a soldier before he’d taken more than a couple of steps. The soldier swept him up in his arms and sat him on the horse his father, Sima Ku, had just ridden up on.
Like a routed army, we headed down Reclining Ox Mountain. What were Babbitt and Niandi doing under the white cloud at that moment? As I rode my mule down the mountain path, I racked my brain trying to conjure up an image of Niandi and Babbitt inside the parachute. What I think I saw was: He was kneeling beside her, holding a stalk of bristlegrass in his hand and brushing the velvety tassel against her breasts, just as I had done not long before. She was lying on her back, her eyes closed, whimpering contentedly, like a dog when you rub its belly. See there, its legs rise into the air, its tail swishes back and forth on the ground. She’s doing whatever it takes to please Babbitt! Not long before, she had nearly turned my backside raw because I’d tickled her with a stalk of grass. That thought angered me, and yet there was more to it than just anger. An erotic feeling was there as well, like flames licking at my heart. “Bitch!” I cursed, sticking my hands inside, as if to choke her. Laidi twisted around. “What’s wrong with you?” she asked. “Babbitt,” I muttered, “Babbitt, the American demon Babbitt has covered up Sixth Sister.”
By the time we’d made our slow, winding way down the mountain, Sima Ku and Babbitt had freed themselves from their cords and were standing there, heads bowed, the ground in front of them covered by lush green grass; Third Sister lay heavily in the muddy ground, face-up. Splashes of mud and clods of uprooted grass dotted the area around her. The avian expression had left her face without a trace. Her eyes were open slightly; a sense of tranquillity had settled onto her still smiling face. Cold glints of light emerging from her eyes pierced my chest and went straight to my heart. Her face was ashen, her lips appeared covered with chalk. Threads of blood had seeped from her nostrils, her ears, and the corners of her eyes, and several alarmed red ants were darting across her face.
Second Sister limped over as fast as she could, fell to her knees beside Third Sister’s body, and shrieked, “Third Sister, Third Sister, Third Sister …” She reached under her neck, as if to help her up. But the neck was as soft and pliable as a rubber band, and she merely stretched it out. The head lay in the crook of Second Sister’s arm, like a dead goose. Second Sister quickly laid Third Sister’s head back down on the ground and picked up her hand. It too was as soft and pliable as rubber. Second Sister cried and cried. “Third Sister, oh, Third Sister, why have you left us …”
First Sister neither cried nor shouted. She merely knelt beside Third Sister and looked up at the people standing around them. Her eyes were unfocused, her gaze narrow, shallow, diffuse. I heard her sigh and watched as she reached back and plucked a velvety pompon, a stately, gentle purple flower with which she wiped off the blood that had seeped out of Third Sister’s nostrils, then her eyes, and finally her ears. Once she’d cleaned up the blood, she brought the purple flower up to her nose and sniffed it, every inch of it, and as she did s
o, I saw a strange smile spread across her face and a light in her eyes that belonged to a person in a certain realm of intoxication. I had the vague feeling that the Bird Fairy’s transcendent, otherworldly spirit was being transferred to the body of Laidi by way of that purple velvety pompon of a flower.
Sixth Sister, who concerned me the most, elbowed her way through the crowd of onlookers and walked slowly up to Third Sister’s body. She neither knelt nor cried. She just stood quietly, fidgeting with the tip of her braid, her head bowed, blushing one minute, ashen-faced the next, like a misbehaving little girl. But she already had the carriage and figure of a young woman; her hair was black and glossy, her buttocks rose up behind her, almost as if a bushy red tail were hidden there. She was wearing a white silk hand-me-down cheongsam from Second Sister, Zhaodi. With high slits on the sides, her long legs showed through. She was barefoot, and there were red scratches on her calves from the sharp-edged leaves of couch grass. The back of her cheongsam was soiled by crushed grass and wildflowers — spots of red here and there amid bright green stains … my thoughts leaped across and squirmed beneath the white cloud that had so gently covered her and Babbitt, bristlegrass … bushy tail… my eyes were like bloodsucking leeches, fastened to her chest. Niandi’s high arching breasts, nipples like cherries, were magnified by the silk of her cheongsam. My mouth filled with sour saliva. From that moment on, whenever I saw a pair of beautiful breasts, my mouth would fill with saliva; I yearned to hold them, suck on them, I yearned to kneel before all the lovely breasts of the world, offer myself as their most faithful son … there where they jutted out, the white silk was marked by a stain, like dog slobber, and my heart ached, as if I'd been an eyewitness to the tableau of Babbitt biting my sixth sister’s nipples. The blue-eyed whelp had gazed up at her chin, while she had stroked the golden hair of his head with the same hands that had so viciously attacked my backside, and all I'd done was gently tickle her, while he had actually bit her. This wicked pain deadened my reaction to Third Sister’s death. But then, Second Sister’s weeping unsettled me, while Eighth Sister’s crying was the sound of nature, which called to mind the cherished memory of Third Sister’s magnificence and her lofty actions that could make trees bend and leaves fall, that could cause the earth to tremble and the heavens to quake, and could incite ghosts to cry and demons to wail.