by Han Shaogong
The jeep screeched off in panic. The owner of the duck was brimming with gratitude toward Zhaoqing: this driver, he said, was in the county government, was a famous bully who'd often come by here in the past; he'd not only been refusing to pay compensation for the duck, he'd even accused the duck of obstructing him in his war duties. If it hadn't been for Zhaoqing's sense of justice, the driver might well have taken him off to the county government.
Zhaoqing took no notice of the gratitude and admiration of bystanders, nor of the weighty import implied by mention of the county government: he was still muttering regretfully that the jeep had slipped away so quickly-if he'd known that was about to happen, he'd have found a carrying pole to pry off the tires.
He and Fucha went on their way: despite their attempts to get a lift with a tractor going the same way as them, driver after driver refused and they had no choice but to walk along the steaming highway. As the sweat dripped off Fucha's face while he walked, he couldn't help complaining: "Anyway, it was the team leader who gave us the bus money, why d'you insist on saving it? You're just making life difficult for yourself!"
"Cost of those tickets, the people ought to protest!" Zhaoqing was referring to the ticket price: "I'll put up with eating and wearing less, but I just can't swallow my temper."
Road sign after road sign they passed. So thirsty their throats and eyes were starting to smoke, they came across a little stand at the roadside selling tea for one cent a bowl. Fucha drank two bowls and told Zhaoqing to have a drink too. Without saying a word, Zhaoqing turned up his nose and just curled up under the shade of a tree to sleep. Braving the sun once more, they finally came across a well after another ten li, at which Zhaoqing borrowed a bowl from a roadside shack and drank eight bowls without pause, drank until his burps rumbled, his eyes glazed over, saliva hung down off his chin and his breath almost choked him. He gave Fucha a smug piece of advice: "You must be awakened, boy, you can't've grown hair around your dragon yet-don't you know how hard life is? People like us can't earn money for other people, we can only earn money for ourselves."
The team leader gave people traveling on business a five jiao meal subsidy. Zhaoqing starved himself throughout one whole day of walking, went home with the full amount and gained a bowl from the shack at the roadside.
*Purple-Teeth Soil
: Purple-teeth soil is the soil you see everywhere in Maqiao, so it shouldn't take too much explaining here. It is, in a nutshell, hard, acidic, and extremely infertile. It's different from metallic loam in that metallic loam is pure white, while purple-teeth soil is deep red with white streaks, a bit like tiger skin.
The thing is, though, if you don't know about purple-teeth soil, then you can't know that much about Maqiao. For a long, long time, this has been the soil Maqiao people have had to face every day, the soil that has made countless harrows tremble, the soil that has transformed countless hands into rolls of blood blisters, into bloody pulps, soil that destroys metal faster than skin, soil that soaks your pants with sweat that runs down to the feet and congeals into salty stains, soil that leaves people dizzy and disoriented, half-alive, half-dead, soil that deletes consciousness of time, that leaves you panting so much that all desires are obliterated, soil that makes every day-the blazing heat of the summer sun, the freezing cold of serious winter-feel the same, soil that drives men to insanity, women to desperation, that leaves children prematurely aged in no time at all, soil that is eternal, inexhaustible, soil that drives people to hate, to argue, to blows, to knives, soil that multiplies hunchbacks, limps, blindness, miscarriages, imbecility, asthma, backache, and deaths, soil that drives people into exile, to suicide, soil that turns life into a daily grind, soil that, regardless of whatever form of upheaval or suffering might be occurring, remains soil upon soil upon soil upon soil upon soil upon soil.
This layer of soil rolls out from the Luo River, from the even more distant eastern mountains of Hunan, coming to an abrupt halt below Tianzi Peak, then meanders toward the villages down south. It had coagulated like a flood of molten iron, a vast, blazing sea of fire that still tortures people throughout their lives.
Zhaoqing's first son was buried alive in this soil. He'd been helping to repair the water reservoir, removing earth to build a dam, and he did what the other public laborers did to get his duties in the earthworks finished a bit faster: first he'd scoop out the soil from underneath to a certain depth, then let the upper soil cave in. This was called releasing the "fairy soil," and was a more efficient way of working. But Shortie Zhao wanted just a bit too much: having scooped out the soil to a depth of three metres, he calculated the purple-teeth soil was too solid to bring the overhanging fairy soil down right away. As he scooped up his bamboo hat, a sudden crashing noise erupted behind him and he turned to see clod upon great clod of red tumble and collapse, somersault and avalanche before his eyes, leaving not a trace, not a whisper of his son.
His son had been playing over there, just a moment ago.
He hurled himself over there, digging, digging, digging red, then more red, digging red, more red red red, digging till all his fingers bled, still without digging out even a scrap of cloth. This was his favorite son, the one who'd been able to say all sorts of things just after his first birthday, who after his second birthday had been able to recognize his own family's chickens and chase his neighbors' chickens out of the house. He'd had a large black mole on his forehead.
*Floating Soul
: Zhaoqing's death has always been a riddle to me.
The very day he disappeared, I'd gone with him to Zhangjia District to help dig a tea plantation. Hearing there'd be meat to eat at midday, he brought his kid son Kuiyuan with him, stuffing a pair of chopsticks into his hands a long time in advance; then as soon as it was time to eat, father and son strode at great speed to the front of the crowd, heading, dashing straight for the kitchen, for the sound of meat sizzling in the pot. The kid hadn't been counted in the total of mouths to feed, but his gaping jaws were very plain to everyone present. People had teamed up in groups of six, with each group entitled to a bowl of meat. No one wanted to accept an extra uncounted mouth hanging on Zhaoqing's tail, and wrangled away till Shortie Zhao flared up. "How much can one slip of a boy eat? Have you no conscience, haven't you got kids yourselves? Are you all going to be destitute old men, without descendants to look after you?"
After this, not everyone could very well continue to put up resistance, and one group was forced, rather grudgingly, to allow father and son to jostle their way in and to listen to their glugging and crunching. They also had to tolerate Zhaoqing rushing forward at the key moment to pour out meat broth for his kid first of all, into a great big ceramic bowl that was tipped bottom-up to the heavens, completely obscuring his little face.
As there was no food left in his own bowl, Shortie Zhao cadged a little green pepper from his son's.
Kuiyuan was the most important person in the world to him, and he'd never neglect to bring along this glugger and cruncher whenever there might be a meat-eating opportunity. Not long before this, I'd heard he'd dreamt at night that while messing around on the mountain Kuiyuan had had a piece of baba cake stolen by a figure dressed in white; even after waking from the dream he'd been still too angry to calm down, had snatched up a grass sickle and gone off to the mountain to settle scores with this figure in white. I couldn't credit it: what kind of a spirit was Old Forder that he had to recover baba cakes lost in a dream?
I didn't really believe this had happened. When we got into the fields, I couldn't stop myself asking him about it.
Not a word from him. Once he got onto the fields, he was totally absorbed, totally unwilling to join in with chatter that had no bearing on work efficiency.
"You've dropped some money behind you," I told him.
He turned back to look.
"There really is money, take a proper look."
"That'd be your little sister's savings, would it?" He concentrated on his digging.
It was
only when he got thirsty and glanced over at my water flask that he started to get all chummy with me, giving a pretty fine imitation of the Educated Youth's barbarian accent: "I say, that flask of yours."
"If you want a drink, then drink-what are you going on about the flask for?"
"Heh-heh, what's eating you today?"
"So you'll only give me the time of day when you want something?"
"What? Have I got to kow-tow just for a gulp of your water?"
As he drank, he counted out loud without being aware of himself: one two, two two… Each second "two" meant two mouthfuls of water.
"If you're going to drink, just drink, why count the twos?" I said rather rudely.
"Just a habit of mine, no need for it." He laughed in embarrassment.
When he'd finished drinking, he became a little politer but remained rather vague about the business of having taken the grass sickle into the mountains: he didn't say it had happened, but neither did he say it hadn't happened. He emphasized indignantly that he'd had several dreams about this figure in white: once the figure had stolen his family's melons, once the family's chickens, another time he'd given his Kuiyuan a clip round the ears for no reason at all. What a nuisance, eh? His teeth ground as he posed the question. There was no answer I could give. From what I'd heard of what he said, those rumors about him snatching up the grass sickle and swearing to settle scores were probably all true.
It was a rum business. Why was this figure in white always barging into his dreams? How come he had so many strange dreams? I couldn't help feeling confused, as I took back the water flask.
That was the last time he borrowed my water flask. The afternoon of the following day, his wife came looking for a cadre, to report that Shortie Zhao hadn't come back home all last night and that she didn't know where he'd gone. Everyone looked everywhere, with growing looks of disquiet, as they remembered they hadn't seen him turn up for work that morning.
"Gone to Maoxing Pond, has he?" said Master Black, laughing.
"But how could he have been gone for so long?" His wife didn't understand what he was talking about.
"I was just… guessing…" Master Black dropped the subject.
"Maoxing Pond" was the name of place in a neighboring village, an isolated dwelling of no more than two households. Shortie Zhao had an old lover there, though who she actually was we had no idea. But whenever he went there to do any work, he'd gather a few branches and blades of grass from off the ground to symbolize grain and firewood, knot them into a wreath and snatch a moment to take it over to "Maoxing Pond" as a token of his affection. He'd then rush back to his work in the fields at incredible speed: nothing less than the wind itself could have moved quicker.
Fucha returned from Maoxing Pond that evening to report there was no Shortie Zhao there either, that absolutely no one had seen a trace of him. Only then did we feel things had started to get serious. Gathered round in whispering huddles, the villagers had identified one piece of news as supremely important. Someone from the lower village had just returned from Pingjiang, bearing a message from Zhihuang's former-pot wife: the dream-woman was reminding Zhaoqing to make sure he had his shoes on.
This was a common method used for warning people in Maqiao, a tip-off to those with "floating souls."
In Maqiao language, floating soul referred to an omen that occurred when people were close to death. After making some general inquiries, I found out there were mainly two sorts of situations involving floating souls:
1. Sometimes, if you saw someone walking along in front of you suddenly disappear, then reappear, you knew a hole had been made in this person's soul and they were going to scatter soon. If you were of a kindly disposition, you'd go and warn this floating soul, but you couldn't do so directly, you couldn't give it away, you'd have to ask something like, "You're running fast! Lost a pair of shoes?" and so on. Hearing this, the other person would've known the score and would rush back home to burn incense, make sacrifices, or ask a Daoist priest to come and drive out the spirits, would do his utmost to avert calamity.
2. Sometimes, while asleep or distracted, a person might dream he'd been dispatched by the King of Hell to fetch another person's soul-an acquaintance of his, perhaps. On waking, again bound by the same principle of discretion, he or she would have to find an ingenious means of giving warning to the other person. Not only were they not to give anything directly away, the two of them also had to be raised off the ground-by climbing up into a tree, for example, and whispering very quietly, to avoid Grandfather Earth hearing, then reporting to and thereby enraging the King of Hell. When the other person heard the warning, he would, of course, be full of thanks, not anger. But there could be no gift to express thanks, no clue that might risk detection by the King of Hell.
Now that the dream-woman Shuishui had mentioned shoes, the situation was of course extremely serious. But because Shuishui's family home was so far from Maqiao, by the time the bearer of the message had hurried back to Maqiao, it was too late and Zhaoqing had already disappeared before the message was delivered. While the village was sending search parties in all directions, someone remembered the business with the figure in white and sent people off to the mountain. Finally, hoarse wails from the cracked throat of Zhaoqing's wife floated in fragments on the wind down the mountain.
Zhaoqing's soul, it turned out, had already floated off. He died horrifically, facedown at the side of a stream, his severed head lying swollen about three meters away in the brook, bitten to pieces by a dense covering of ants. This violent murder sent Shockwaves through the commune and the county's Public Security, and several cadres came to conduct repeated investigations. The cadres' flame was high and they didn't believe in any floating-soul business, or in fate. Their first guess was that GMD spies had been dropped from the air onto the mountain, or that oxen-rustling bad elements from near Pingjiang were responsible. In order to calm the general public and stop the strange rumors flying around, the higher-ups made strenuous efforts to solve the case, carrying out mysterious surveys, taking fingerprints, struggling a few suspicious landlords and rich peasants here and there, panicking the chickens and the dogs half to death-but still no explanation was found. The commune even arranged for the People's Militia to take turns standing guard in the evenings, to guard against tragedy repeating itself.
Standing guard was a tough job. The evenings being cold and the urge to doze off very strong, I was propped up under the armpit by a spear, my feet like two blocks of ice, and needed to jump regularly up and down to restore sensation to my toes. I heard crunching footsteps on the road leading to Tianzi Peak: every tiny hair stood up on end as I listened out again-nothing. Despite hiding in a corner out of the wind, I couldn't control my intermittent shivers. After brief hesitation, I took another few steps back and retreated to the house: even though (just as a temporary expedient) I was surveying the night from behind a window, I was still fulfilling my duties, I reasoned. In the end, my legs tortured with cold and my eyes ever returning to my quilt, I couldn't stop myself burrowing in and (half-)lying on the bed. I still reckoned I was taking frequent sidelong glances outside, not failing to keep up my revolutionary vigilance.
I was worried a figure dressed in white would suddenly skim past outside.
Dazed and confused, I woke up to discover it was already very light; in a panic, I ran outside without glimpsing a soul. Some routine yells were coming from the ox-shed-someone preparing to let the oxen out. All was quiet and peaceful.
Since I couldn't spot anyone come to investigate where the sentry had gone, I relaxed.
It was not until I was transferred to work in the county and bumped into Yanwu on a visit to the city to buy oil paint that I heard another theory concerning the strange death of Shortie Zhao. Yanwu said that at the time he'd told Public Security that Zhaoqing had definitely not been killed by a third party-it'd been suicide. Or, to be more precise, it was accidental death by suicide. Why did he die at the side of the stream? he mused. Why had t
here been no sign of a struggle on the scene? He must've found some fish or something else in the stream, hidden in the crack of a stone, and poked at it with the wooden handle on his grass knife. He must have poked a bit too violently, without noticing the sharp blade was pointed directly at his own neck: with one stab into the air, one pull of the knife, he lopped his own head off from behind.
This hypothesis was very daring. I've used a grass knife, sometimes called a dragon-horse knife: it's a knife with a very long wooden handle that enables you to slash cattail grass whilst standing upright, on which the blade and wooden handle are at right angles. When I thought about it, with Yanwu's deductions in mind, a chill ran right down the back of my neck.
Unfortunately, as Yanwu's class status was very poor at the time, the Public Security Bureau couldn't take any notice of what he said.
Besides, he didn't have any proof.
*Lax
: And so, amidst such confused circumstances, Zhaoqing's head fell off. While on sentry duty in the middle of the night, viewing Tianzi Peak suddenly loom closer, vaster in the moonlight, I got to thinking about his life. Because he was so low, so stingy, I'd never had a good word to say about him. Only after his death did I think back to that time when (under orders from above) I'd climbed up a wall to paint Chairman Mao quotations and the ladder had suddenly started sliding unstoppably downwards; I'd only saved myself from falling by grabbing onto a horizontal beam close at hand. Quite some distance off, Zhaoqing had seen all this happen, dropped a bowl of food from his hand to the ground with a clang and ran over yelling: "help-someone help-oh my-" He jumped up and down, producing cries of extreme anguish, jumped here and there till he was dizzy, then jumped back again without having accomplished anything much, wailing and weeping as he did so.