Big Breasts and Wide Hips

by Mo Yan

  Xiao smacked him on the side of the head. “You little fuckhead!” he swore. “Who the hell are you to talk to me like that? I won’t let some snot-nose darling of Huo Lina get away with that!”

  At breakfast, as he sat looking down at his bowl of corn porridge, Jintong’s stomach lurched, and he knew that his frightful aversion to all food except mother’s milk had taken hold again. So he picked up the bowl and, calling up the remnants of clear thought in his murky brain, forced himself to start drinking the porridge; but the moment the liquid came into view, a pair of living breasts seemed to rise out of the bowl, which fell from his hands and shattered on the floor, the hot porridge splashing on his legs. He didn’t feel a thing.

  His frightened classmates immediately dragged him over to the clinic, where the school nurse cleaned his legs and rubbed ointment on the burns, then told his classmates to take him back to the dormitory.

  There he ripped up Natasha’s photograph and tossed the pieces into the river behind the school; he watched as Natasha, now in shreds, flowed downstream into a swirling eddy, where she came together again and, like a naked mermaid, floated on the surface, the wet locks of her hair draping over her hips.

  His classmates, who had followed him down to the river, watched as he spread his arms and dove into the water, after shouting something. Some of them ran down to the river’s edge, while others ran back to school for help. As he sank below the surface, Jintong saw Natasha swimming like a fish amid the waterweeds. He tried to call to her, but water rushed into his mouth and stifled his shout.

  The next time Jintong opened his eyes, he was lying on Mother’s kang. He tried to sit up, but Mother held him down and stuffed the nipple of a bottle of goat’s milk into his mouth. Dimly, he recalled that the old goat was long dead, so where had the milk come from? Since he couldn’t get his stubborn brain working, he wearily closed his eyes. Mother and First Sister were talking about exorcism, but the thin sound of their voices seemed to come from a bottle far away. “He must be possessed,” Mother said. “Possessed?” First Sister asked. “By what?” “I think it’s an evil fox spirit.” “Could it be that widow?” First

  Sister asked. “She worshipped a fox fairy when she was alive.” “You’re right,” Mother replied. “She shouldn’t be coming for Jintong… we barely had a chance to enjoy a few good days …” “Mother,” First Sister said, “these so-called good days have been torture for me. That half-man of mine is crushing me to death … he’s like a dog, but a useless one. Mother, don’t blame me if I do something.” “Why would I blame you?” Mother said.

  Jintong lay in bed for two days, as his mind slowly cleared. Natasha’s image kept floating before his eyes. When he washed up, her weeping face appeared in the basin. When he looked in the mirror, she smiled back at him. Every time he closed his eyes, he heard the sound of her breathing; he could even feel her soft hair brush up against his face and her warm fingers move over his body. His mother, frightened by her son’s erratic behavior, followed him everywhere, wringing her hands and whimpering like a little girl. His gaunt face stared back at him from the water in their vat. “She’s in there!” “Who is?” his mother asked. “She is?” “Who is she?” “Natasha! And she’s unhappy.” She watched as her son thrust his hand into the vat. Nothing there except water, but her excited son muttered words she couldn’t understand. So she dragged him away and covered the vat. But Jintong fell to his knees in front of a basin and began speaking in tongues to the spirit of the water inside. As soon as his mother dumped the water out of the basin, Jintong pressed his lips up against the window, as if to kiss his own reflection.

  Tears glistened on his mother’s face. Jintong saw Natasha dancing in those tears, jumping from one to the next. “There she is!” he said, a moronic look on his face, pointing at his mother’s face. “Don’t go, Natasha.”

  “Where is she?”

  “In your tears.”

  Mother hurriedly dried her tears. “Now she’s jumped into your eyes!” Jintong shouted.

  Finally, his mother understood. Natasha appeared anywhere there was a reflection. So she covered everything that held water, buried the mirrors, covered the windows with black paper, and would not let her son look into her eyes.

  But Jintong saw Natasha take shape in the darkness. He had moved from the stage of trying everything possible to avoid Natasha to a frenzied pursuit of her; she, meanwhile, had moved from the stage of being everywhere to hiding from place to place. Calling out, “Listen to me, Natasha,” he ran headlong into a dark corner. She crawled into a mouse hole under a cabinet; he stuck his face up to the hole and tried to crawl in after her. In his mind, he actually made it, and followed her down a winding path, calling out, “Don’t run away from me, Natasha. Why are you doing this?” Natasha crawled out through another hole and disappeared. He looked everywhere for her, finally spotting her stuck to the wall, after stretching herself out thin as a sheet of paper. He ran up and began stroking the wall with both hands, as if he were caressing her face. Bending at the waist, Natasha slipped under his arms and crawled up the stove chimney, her face quickly covered with soot. Kneeling at the foot of the stove, he reached out to wipe the soot from her face, but it wouldn’t come off. Instead, his own face was streaked with soot.

  Not knowing what else to do, Mother fell to her knees, kowtowed, and summoned the great exorcist Fairy Ma, who had not practiced his craft for many years.

  The man of spirits came in a long black robe, his hair hanging loose around his shoulders. He was barefoot, both feet stained bright red. Holding a peachwood sword in one hand, he murmured things no one could understand. The moment he saw him, Jintong was reminded of all the strange tales he’d heard about the man and, as if he’d swallowed a mouthful of vinegar, felt his head shudder; a crack opened up in his confused mind, and Natasha’s image vanished, for the moment at least. The fairy had a dark purplish face with bulging eyes that gave him a feral look. He coughed up a mouthful of phlegm and spat it out like the wet stool of a chicken. Waving his wooden sword in the air, he performed a strange dance. Soon tiring, he stood beside the water basin and, uttering a spell, spat into the basin; then, holding the sword in both hands, he began stirring the water, which slowly turned red. That was followed by another dance. Growing tired again, he went back to stirring the water, until it was the color of fresh blood. Throwing down his sword, he sat on the floor, breathing heavily. He dragged Jintong up beside him and said, “Look into the basin and tell me what you see.” Jintong detected a sweet-smelling herbal odor as he stared at the mirrorlike surface of the water, stunned by the face that looked back at him. How had Jintong, so full of life, turned into a haggard, wrinkled, and very ugly young man? “What do you see?” the fairy pressed him. Natasha’s bloody face rose slowly out of the basin and merged with his. She slipped out of her dress and pointed to the bloody wound on her breast. “Shangguan Jintong,” she cursed, “how could you be so heartless?” “Natasha!” Jintong shrieked as he buried his face in the water. He heard the fairy say to Mother and Laidi, “He’s fine now. You can carry him back to his room.”

  Leaping to his feet, Jintong threw himself on the mountain fairy. It was the first time in his life he had actually attacked someone. What courage it took to attack someone who dealt with ghosts and demons! All for the sake of Natasha. With his left hand he grabbed the fairy’s gray goatee and pulled with all his might, stretching the man’s mouth until it was a black oval. Vile-smelling saliva slithered down his hand. Cupping her injured breast in one hand, Natasha sat on the fairy’s tongue and looked admiringly at Jintong. Spurred on by the look, he tugged harder on the goatee, this time using both hands. The fairy’s body bent over painfully, until he looked like the picture of the Sphinx in their geography text. Moving awkwardly, he struck Jintong on the leg with his wooden sword. But Jintong felt no pain, thanks to Natasha, and even if he had, he wouldn’t have let go, because Natasha was in the man’s mouth. The thought of what would happen if he let go made him
shudder: The fairy would chew Natasha to pulp and swallow her into his digestive tract. The fairy’s intestines were filthy things! Hurry, Natasha, get away from there! he shouted anxiously. But she remained seated on the fairy’s tongue, as if she were deaf. The man’s goatee was getting more slippery by the minute, for the blood from Natasha’s breast had seeped into his whiskers. He kept tugging, hand over hand, her blood staining Jintong’s fingers. The fairy tossed his sword away, reached out with both hands, grabbed Jintong’s ears, and pulled with all his might. Jintong’s lips parted and he heard shrieks from Mother and First Sister. But nothing was going to make him let loose of the fairy’s goatee. The two combatants circled the yard, round and round, followed closely by Mother and First Sister. Something on the ground tripped Jintong, who stopped his hand-overhand motion just long enough for the fairy to bite down on one of them. His ears felt as if they were about to be wrenched off the sides of his head; the back of his hand had been bitten to the bone. He screamed in pain, but that was nothing compared to the pain in his heart. Everything was a blur. Frantic, he thought of Natasha. The fairy had swallowed her, and she was now in his stomach, crumbling in his digestive juices; the prickly walls of his stomach were kneading her mercilessly. The blurred vista before him darkened until it was black as the belly of a cuttlefish.

  Speechless Sun, who had gone out to buy a bottle, came into the yard. With the keen eye and rich experience of a soldier, he immediately figured out what was going on. Calmly as can be, he set the bottle down at the base of the side room wall. “Jintong’s in trouble!” Mother shouted. “Save him!” Speechless Sun effortlessly maneuvered himself up behind the fairy, lifted both little stools into the air, and brought them down together into the man’s calves; he dropped like a stone. Speechless Sun’s stools swirled in the air a second time and came down on the fallen man’s arms; Jintong’s ears were set free. Sun’s stools came crashing into the fairy’s ears; he spat out Jintong’s hand and began rolling in agony on the ground. He reached out to pick up his sword and clenched his teeth. Speechless Sun roared; the man shuddered. By then, Jintong was wailing and struggling to charge the fairy again, determined to rip open the man’s belly and rescue Natasha. But Mother and First Sister had their arms wrapped around him and were holding him back. The fairy took off, giving the crouching tiger, Speechless Sun, a wide berth.

  Very gradually, Jintong recovered his equilibrium, but not his appetite. So Mother went to see the district chief, who immediately sent someone out to buy goat’s milk. Jintong spent most of the time lying in bed, only occasionally getting up to stretch his legs. His eyes were as lifeless as ever. Every time he thought of poor Natasha and her bleeding breast, tears sluiced down his cheeks. Lacking the will to speak, he broke his silence infrequently by muttering to himself; but the minute anyone approached him, he shut up.

  One hazy morning, as he lay in bed staring at the ceiling, his tears over Natasha’s injured breast barely dry, he felt his nose stop up and his brain begin to turn mushy; a need to go back to sleep swept over him. All of a sudden, a shrill, hair-raising scream tore from Laidi and the mute’s room, driving away all thoughts of sleep. Cocking his ear to hear what it was all about, the only thing he heard was a buzzing in his ears. He was about to close his eyes when another shrill scream, this one longer and more horrifying, came on the air. His heart raced and his scalp tightened. Driven by curiosity, he crawled out of bed and tiptoed over to the door to the eastern room, where he peeked in through a crack. Speechless Sun, stripped naked, was a big, black spider, wrapped around Laidi’s soft, thin waist. Slobber covered his protruding lips as he sucked first on one of Laidi’s nipples, then the other. Her neck stretched out long over the edge of the bed, her upturned face white as the outer leaf of a cabbage. Her full breasts, the same ones Jintong had seen as she lay in the mule trough all those years before, were like yellowing steamed buns, lying spongily above her rib cage. There was blood on the tips of her nipples and bite marks on her chest and upper arms. Speechless Sun had turned Laidi’s body, once so fair and silky, into something that looked like a scaled fish. Her long legs lay bare on the bed.

  When Jintong began to sob, Speechless Sun picked up a bottle at the head of the bed and flung it toward the door, sending Jintong running out into the yard, where he picked up a brick and threw it at the window. “Mute!” he shouted. “You’re going to die a horrible death!”

  The words were barely out of his mouth when exhaustion overcame him. Natasha’s image floated before his eyes and quickly dissolved like a puff of smoke.

  The mute’s powerful fist smashed through the window; Jintong backed off in terror, all the way to the parasol tree, where he watched the fist draw back inside the room and a stream of yellow piss emerge through the hole and drip into a bucket beneath the window, placed there for that very purpose. Grinding his teeth in anger, Jintong walked over to the side room, where a strange figure came up to him. The person walked at a crouch, dragging his long arms behind him. Beneath his shaved head and bushy gray eyebrows, the large black eyes were circled by fine wrinkles and were so forbidding it was hard to look into them. Purple welts — some large, some small — covered his face, and his ears were scarred and ragged, burned in places and bitten by frostbite in others, looking like the shriveled ears of a monkey. He was wearing a gray, high-collared, ill-fitting tunic that reeked of mothballs. A pair of bony hands with chipped and cracked nails hung at his sides and shook uncontrollably. “Who are you looking for?” Jintong asked in a loathsome voice, assuming it was one of the mute’s comrades-in-arms. The man bowed deferentially and replied, his tongue stiff, his mouth forming the words awkwardly:

  “Home … Shangguan Lingdi… I’m … Birdman … Han …”

  3

  Birdman Han gave me a terrible shock on the day he walked back into our house. I dimly recalled something involving a bird fairy in my past, but that was all about some romantic dealings with the mute, that and the incident where the fairy had jumped off a cliff. But I had no memory of this strange brother-in-law. I glided off to one side to let him out into the yard, just as Laidi, a white sheet around her waist, and naked from there up, ran out into the yard. The mute’s fist tore through the paper window covering, followed by the upper half of his body. “Strip!” he said. “Strip!” Laidi, in tears, stumbled and fell. Her sheet had been stained red by blood from down below. And that is how she appeared in front of Birdman Han — tormented and half-naked, blood dripping down her legs.

  Mother returned, with Eighth Sister in tow and driving a goat ahead of them. She didn’t seem overly surprised by First Sister’s unsightly appearance, but the minute she spotted Birdman Han, she crumpled to the ground. It wasn’t until much later that Mother told me she realized at once that he had returned to demand his due, and that we would have to come up with the principal and interest for the birds we’d eaten fifteen years before, before he’d been taken forcibly to Japan, where he’d escaped and led a primitive existence.

  The arrival of Birdman Han would bring to an end the wealth and rank we had obtained by sacrificing Mother’s eldest daughter. But that did not stop her from preparing a sumptuous welcoming meal. This strange bird that had dropped from the sky sat trancelike in our yard as he watched Mother and Laidi busy themselves at the stove. Moved by Birdman’s unusual tale of fifteen years hiding out in Japan, Laidi temporarily forgot her suffering at the hands of the mute, who maneuvered himself out into the yard and looked Birdman over provocatively.

  At the table, Birdman handled his chopsticks so awkwardly he couldn’t pick up a single piece of meat. So Mother took them from him and urged him to eat with his hands. He raised his head. “She … my … wife?” Mother cast a hateful glance at the mute, who was gnawing on a chicken head. “She,” Mother said, “has gone far away.”

  Mother’s kind nature would not allow her to refuse Birdman’s request to live with us, not to mention the urgings of the district chief and the head of the Civil Administration: “He has no pla
ce else to go, and it’s up to us to satisfy the needs of someone who has returned to us from Hell. Not only that…” “You don’t need to say any more,” Mother interrupted. “Just send over some people to help us put the side room in order for him.”

  And with that, Birdman Han moved into the two rooms in which the Bird Fairy had once lived. Mother reached up into the dusty rafters and took down the insect-scarred drawing of the Bird Fairy and hung it on the northern wall. When Birdman saw the drawing, he said, “I know who killed my wife, and one of these days Fll get my revenge.”

  The extraordinary love affair between First Sister and Birdman Han was like a marshland opium poppy — toxic yet wildly beautiful. That afternoon, the mute went off to the co-op to buy some liquor. While First Sister washed a pair of underwear beneath the peach tree, Mother sat on the kang making a duster out of the feathers of a rooster. She heard a noise at the door and saw Birdman Han, who was once again hunting birds, walk lightly into the yard, a beautiful little bird perched on one of his fingers. He went up to the peach tree and stared down at Laidi’s neck. The bird chirped fetchingly, making its feathers tremble. The swirling chirps incited the fine hairs of her passion. Deep-seated feelings of remorse settled in Mother’s heart. That bird was nothing less than the incarnation of Birdman Han’s pain and suffering. She watched as Laidi raised her head and gazed at the bird’s beautiful blood-red chest and black, heartbreaking eyes, no bigger than sesame seeds. Mother saw Laidi’s cheeks redden and her eyes grow wet, and she knew that the bird’s passionate cries were raising the curtain on the one thing she’d worried about. But she was powerless to stop it from happening, for she knew that when the emotions of a Shangguan girl were stirred, not even a herd of horses could alter the course of events. In the grip of despair, she squeezed her eyes shut.