by Mo Yan
Steam rose from the center of every table, curling up near the electric lamps, where it turned to mist before dissipating. The tables were a jumble of plates and glasses, the guests’ faces blurred, and the air inside the church stifling with the smell of alcohol. Babbitt and his wife were back at their own table. I watched as Niandi leaned over to Zhaodi and whispered something. What did she say? Was it about me? When Zhaodi nodded, Niandi leaned back, picked up a spoon and dipped it into the soup, then put it up to her mouth, wetted her lips, and drank it elegantly. Niandi had known Babbitt little more than a month, but she was already a different person. A month earlier, she’d been a common porridge-slurper. A month earlier, she’d been as noisy as anyone when she spat or blew her nose on the ground. I’d found her disgusting; but I’d admired her too. How could anyone change so quickly? Waiters came out carrying the main courses: there were boiled dumplings and some of those wormlike noodles that had ruined my appetite. There were also some colorful pastries. I can’t bring myself to describe how the people looked when they ate. I was upset and I was hungry; Mother and my goat must have been waiting anxiously. So why didn’t I get up and leave? Because after Sima Ku’s proclamation, and after the meal, Babbitt was going to demonstrate once again the material and cultural superiority of the West. I knew he was going to show a moving picture, which, according to what I’d heard, was a series of live images projected on a screen by electricity.
Finally, the banquet ended, and the waiters came out with bushel baskets, spread out, and swept the tables clean of glasses and dishes, dumping it all noisily into the baskets. What went into the baskets was perfectly usable dinnerware; what they carried away were shards of glass and pieces of ceramic. A dozen or so crack troops ran in to lend a hand, each grabbing a tablecloth, folding it up, and running off with it. Then the waiters returned to spread out fresh tablecloths, on top of which they laid out grapes and cucumbers, watermelons and pears from Hebei; there was also something called Brazilian coffee, which was the color of sweet potatoes and gave off a strange odor — one pot after another, more than I could count. Then one cup after another, also more than I could count. The guests, still belching from all the food, came out to sit down again and take some tentative sips of the Brazilian coffee, as if it were some sort of Chinese medicine.
The soldiers carried in a rectangular table on which they placed a machine that was covered by a piece of red cloth.
Sima Ku clapped his hands and announced loudly, “The movie will begin in a few minutes. Let’s welcome Mr. Babbitt, who will show us something special.”
Babbitt stood up amid thunderous applause and bowed to the crowd. He then walked up to the table and removed the red cloth to reveal a mysterious, demonic machine. His fingers moved skillfully amid a bunch of wheels, big and small, until a rumbling noise emerged from the bowels of the machine. A beam of light knifed through the air and landed on the west wall of the church. It was met by a roar of approval, which was followed by the noise of stools being dragged across the floor. People turned to follow the light. At first it landed on the carved face of Jesus on the jujube cross that had recently been dug up and re-nailed to the wall. The features of the holy icon were unrecognizable. A yellow medicinal pore fungus called lingzhi now grew where the eyes had once been. As a devout Christian, Babbitt had insisted that the wedding take place in the church. During the day, the Lord had watched over the marriage rites for him and Niandi with pore-fungus eyes; now when night had fallen, he illuminated the Lord’s eyes with an electric light, covering the pore fungus with a white mist. The beam of light began to descend, from Jesus’ face to His chest, and from there to His abdomen, to His lower parts, which the Chinese woodcarver had covered with a lotus leaf, and down to the tips of His toes. Finally, the beam settled on a rectangular sheet of white cloth with wide black borders that hung on the gray wall. It was adjusted until it fit within the black borders, then shifted a bit more before holding steady. At that moment I heard the machine make a sound like rainwater cascading down from eaves.
“Turn off the lamps!” Babbitt shouted.
With a pop, the lamps hanging from the rafters went out, and we were thrown into darkness. But the beam of light from Babbitt’s demonic machine intensified. Clusters of little white insects danced in the air and a white moth flitted erratically in the center of the beam, its shape suddenly magnified several times its original size against the white sheet. I heard cries of delight from the crowd; even I gasped. And there, in front of my eyes, were the electric images. Suddenly, a head appeared in the shaft of light. It belonged to Sima Ku. The light shone through his earlobes, in which the flow of blood was visible to us all. His head moved as he turned to face the spot where the light was coming from. His face flattened out and turned white as a sheet of paper, while blocking out a big section of the screen. Loud cries emerged from the darkness.
“Sit down!” Babbitt shouted irately, as a delicate white hand was thrust into the beam of light. Sima Ku’s head sank beneath the light. The wall made a series of popping sounds, as dark specks flickered on the screen — the sight and sound of gunshots. Music then burst from a sound box hanging next to the screen. It sounded a little like a string instrument, the huqin, and a little like a wind instrument, the suona, but not exactly like either. It was thin and tinny, like mung bean noodles being squeezed through the holes of a sieve.
Some white, squiggly words appeared on the screen, several lines of them, some big and some small, rising from the bottom. More shouts from the crowd. Water, it’s said, always flows downward, but these foreign words flowed in the opposite direction, disappearing into the blackness of the wall when they reached the top of the screen. A crazy thought popped into my head: Would they be found embedded in the church wall tomorrow morning? Water then appeared on the screen, flowing down a riverbed bordered by trees, noisy birds hopping around on the branches. Our mouths fell open in amazement; we forgot to shout. The next scene was of a man with a rifle slung over his back, his open-front shirt revealing a hairy chest. A cigarette dangled from his lips, smoke curling upward from the tip and streaming out from his nostrils. My god, what a sight! A black bear lumbered out from a stand of trees and went straight for the man. Shrieks from women and the sound of a pistol being cocked erupted in the church. The silhouette of a man burst into the beam of light. Sima Ku again. Revolver in hand. He had intended to shoot the bear, but its image on the screen behind him was shattered.
“Sit down, you damned fool!” Babbitt shouted. “Sit down! It’s a movie!”
Sima Ku sat back down, but by then the bear already lay dead on the screen, a stream of green blood seeping from its chest. The hunter was sitting on the ground beside it, reloading.
“Son of a bitch!” Sima Ku shouted. “What a marksman!”
The man on the screen looked up, muttered something I couldn’t understand, and then smiled contemptuously. Slinging his rifle over his back again, he stuck two fingers in his mouth and let out a shrill whistle, which echoed in the church. A horse-drawn wagon rumbled up along the riverbank. The horse had a proud, defiant look, but in a sort of stupid way. Its harness looked familiar, as if I’d seen it somewhere. A woman stood in the wagon behind the shaft, her long hair tossing in the wind; I couldn’t tell what color it was. She had a big face, a jutting forehead, gorgeous eyes, and curled lashes as black and bristly as a cat’s whiskers. Her mouth was enormous, her lips black and shiny. She looked immoral to me. Her breasts bounced and jiggled like crazy, like a pair of white rabbits caught by the tail. They were much bigger and fuller than any in the Shangguan family. She drove the wagon straight toward me at a gallop; my heart lurched, my lips tingled, my palms were sweaty. I jumped to my feet, but was pushed back down on the bench by a powerful hand on my head. I turned to look. The man’s mouth was wide open; I didn’t recognize him. The area behind him was packed with people, some even blocking the door. Others seemed to be hanging on the doorframe. Out in the street, people clamored to squeeze in.
> The woman reined the horse in and jumped down off the wagon. She picked up the hem of her dress, exposing her milky white legs, and shouted, to the man, that I could tell. Then she took off running, still shouting. Sure enough, she was shouting at him. Ignoring the dead bear, he took his rifle off his back, threw it to the ground, and ran toward the woman. Her face, her eyes, her mouth, her white teeth, her heaving breasts. Then the face of the man, bushy eyebrows, eyes like a hawk, a glistening beard, and a shiny scar that separated his brow from his temple. Back to the woman’s face. Then back to the man’s. The woman’s feet as she flicked off her shoes. The man’s clumsy feet. The woman ran into the man’s arms. Her breasts were flattened. She attacked the man’s face with her large mouth. His mouth clamped over hers. Then, your mouth is outside, mine is inside. Two mouths coupling. Moans and chirps, all from the woman. Then their arms, draped around a neck or wrapped around a waist. The hands began to roam, over me, over you, until finally the two of them fell to the grassy carpet and began to writhe and tumble, the man on top one minute, the woman on top the next. They rolled around, over and over, for quite some distance, and then stopped. The man’s hairy hand slipped under the woman’s dress and grabbed one of her full breasts. My poor heart was being torn apart, and hot tears spilled out of my eyes.
The beam of light went out and the screen went dark. Pop, a lamp was lit next to the demonic machine. All around me people were gasping and panting. The hall was packed, including a bunch of bare-assed kids sitting on a table in front of me. From where he stood, alongside the machine, Babbitt looked like a celestial fairy in the light of the lamp. The spools of the machine kept turning, and turning. Finally, with a pop, they stopped.
Sima Ku jumped to his feet. “I’ll be goddamned!” he said with a hearty laugh. “Don’t stop now, play it again!”
4
On the fourth night, the movie-viewing was moved to the Sima compound’s spacious threshing floor, where the Sima Battalion — officers and men — and the commanders’ families sat in the seats of honor, village and township bigwigs sat in rows behind them, while ordinary citizens stood wherever they could find room. The large white sheet was hung in front of a lotus-covered pond, behind which the old, infirm, and crippled stood or sat, enjoying their view of the movie from the back, along with the sight of people watching it from the front.
That day was recorded in the annals of Northeast Gaomi Township, and as I think back now, I can see that nothing that day was normal. The weather was stiflingly hot at noon; the sun was black, sending fish belly-up in the river and birds falling out of the sky. A lively young soldier was felled by cholera while digging postholes and hanging the screen, and as he writhed on the ground in excruciating pain, a green liquid poured from his mouth; that was not normal. Dozens of purple snakes with yellow spots formed lines and wriggled their way down the street; that was not normal. White cranes from the marshes landed on soap-bean trees at the entrance to the village, flocks and flocks of them, their sheer weight snapping off branches, white feathers blanketing the trees. Flapping wings, necks like snakes, and stiff legs; that was not normal. Gutsy Zhang, who had gained his nickname owing to his status as the strongest man in the village, tossed a dozen stone rollers from the threshing floor into the pond; that was not normal. In midafternoon, a group of travel-weary strangers showed up. They sat on the bank of the Flood Dragon River to eat flatcakes as thin as paper and chew on radishes. When asked where they’d come from, they said Anyang, and when asked why they’d come, they said for the movies. When asked how they’d learned that movies were being shown here, they said that good news travels faster than the wind; this was not normal. Mother uncharacteristically told us a joke about a foolish son-in-law, and this too was not normal. At sunset, the sky turned radiant with burning colors that kept changing; this too was not normal. The waters of the Flood Dragon River ran blood red, and this too was not normal. As night began to fall, mosquitoes gathered in swarms that floated above the threshing floor like dark clouds, which was not normal. On the surface of the pond, late-blooming lotuses looked like celestial beings beneath the reddening sunset, and this was not normal. My goat’s milk reeked of blood, and that truly was not normal.
Having taken my evening fill of milk, I ran like the wind over to the threshing floor with Sima Liang, drawn irresistibly to the movie, running head-on toward the sunset. We set our sights on the women carrying benches and dragging their children along and the oldsters with canes, since they were the ones we could easily overtake. Xu Xian’er, a blind man with a captivatingly hoarse voice, survived by singing for handouts. He was up ahead walking fast, making his way by tapping the ground in front of him. The proprietor of the cooking oil shop, an aged single-breasted woman known as Old Jin, asked him, “Where are you off to in such a hurry, blind man?” “I’m blind,” he said. “Are you blind too?” An old man called White Face Du, a fisherman wearing his customary palm-bark cape, was carrying a stool made of woven cat-tail. “How do you expect to watch a movie, blind man?” he asked. “White Face,” the blind man replied angrily, “to me you’re a white asshole! How dare you say I’m blind! I close my eyes so I can see through worldly affairs.” Swinging his pole over his head until it whistled in the wind, he came dangerously close to snapping one of White Face Du’s egret-like legs. Du stepped up to the blind man and was about to hit him with his cattail stool, but was stopped just in time by Half Circle Fang, half of whose face had been licked away by a bear one day when he was up on Changbai Mountain gathering ginseng. “Old Du,” he said, “what would people think if you started a fight with a blind man? We all live in the same village. We win some arguments and we lose others, but it’s always a matter of someone’s bowl smashing into someone else’s plate, and that’s how it goes. Up there on Changbai Mountain, it’s no easy matter to run into a fellow villager, so you feel as if you’re with family!” All sorts of people crowded onto the Sima threshing floor. Just listen, all those families at the dinner table talking about Sima Ku’s achievements, while gossipy women gossip about the Shangguan girls. We felt light as a feather, our spirits soared, and all we wanted was for movies to be shown forever.
Sima Liang and I had reserved seats right in front of Babbitt’s machine. Shortly after we sat down and before the colors had finished burning their way across the western sky, a rank, salty smell came to us on the gloomy night winds. Directly in front of us was an empty circle marked off by quicklime. Deaf Han Guo, a crooked-legged villager, was kept busy driving township residents out of the circle with a branch from a parasol tree. His breath reeked of alcohol and bits of scallion clung to his teeth. Glaring with mantislike eyes, he swung his parasol branch mercilessly and knocked a red silk flower right off the head of the cross-eyed little sister of someone called Sleepyhead. Little Gross-eyes had had relations with the quartermaster of every military unit that had ever bivouacked in the village. At the time, she was wearing a satin undershirt given to her by Wang Baihe, the Sima Battalion quartermaster. Her smoky breath came from Quartermaster Wang. With a curse, she bent down and picked up the flower, scooping up a handful of dirt at the same time, which she flung into Deaf Han Guo’s mantislike eyes. The dirt blinded Han Guo, who threw down his parasol branch and frantically spat out a mouthful of dirt as he rubbed his eyes and cursed, “Fuck you, you cross-eyed little whore! Fuck your mother’s daughter!” Big-mouthed Zhao Six, a dealer in steamed bums, said in a soft voice, “Deaf Han Guo, why keep running around like that? Why not just come out and say fuck the cross-eyed little bitch?” The words were barely out of his mouth when a little cypress stool slammed against his shoulder. Aiya! he yelped as he spun around. The assailant was the cross-eyed girl’s brother, Sleepyhead, a skinny, haggard-looking man who parted his hair down the middle, like a scar, leaving tufts hanging down both sides. Dressed in a dusty gray silk shirt, he was quaking. His head was greasy, his eyes blinked nonstop. Sima Liang told me on the sly that the cross-eyed girl and her brother had a thing going. Where had he hear
d this juicy gossip? “Little Uncle,” he informed me, “my dad says they’re going to shoot Quartermaster Wang tomorrow.” “How about Sleepyhead, are they going to shoot him too?” I asked under my breath. Sleepyhead had called me a bastard once, so I had no use for him. “I’ll go talk to my dad,” Sima Liang said, “and have him shoot that little family rapist too.” “Right,” I agreed, venting my hatred. “Shoot that little family rapist!” Deaf Han Guo, tears streaming from his now nearly useless eyes, was flailing his arms in the air. Zhao Six grabbed the stool out of Sleepyhead’s hands before he could be hit a second time and flung it in the air. “Fuck your sister!” he said bluntly. Sleepyhead, his fingers twisted into claws, grabbed Zhao Six by the throat; Zhao Six grabbed Sleepyhead by the hair, and the two of them grappled all the way over to the empty circle reserved for members of the Sima Battalion, each with a death grip on the other. The cross-eyed girl joined the fray to help her brother, but landed more punches on his back than anywhere. Finally seeing an opening, she slipped around behind Zhao Six, like a bat, reached up between his legs, and grabbed hold of his balls, a move that was met with a roar of approval from Comet Guan, a martial arts expert. “That’s it, a perfect lower peach-pick!” With a scream of pain, Zhao Six let go of his opponent and bent over like a cooked shrimp. His body shrank; his face turned the color of gold in the darkening curtain of night. The cross-eyed girl squeezed with all her might. “Didn’t I hear the word fuck?” she hissed. “Well, I’m waiting!” Zhao Six crumpled to the ground, where he lay, overcome by spasms. Meanwhile, Deaf Han Guo, his face awash in tears, picked up his parasol branch and, like the demon image at the head of a funeral procession, began flailing in all directions, not caring who he hit — wheat or chaff, royalty or commoner alike — wreaking havoc on anyone within striking distance. His branch whistled through the air, as women shrieked and children wailed. Those on the outer edges of the crowd pushed up closer to watch the fun, while those in danger of being hit ran for their lives, heading the other way. Shouts swept the area like a tidal wave, as clumps of people converged, trampling and shoving each other. I watched as the branch struck the cross-eyed girl squarely on her backside, sending her darting into the crowd, where the hands of avenging souls plus a few with no other purpose than to cop a feel found their mark and were met with howls of protest.