by Han Shaogong
The upshot of the mediation was that Yanwu made a few concessions and agreed to give the remainder of Kuiyuan's family 800 yuan in "comfort money"; in return, Kuiyuan's family would no longer harbor old grievances and old scores would be completely canceled out. In accordance with past custom, the Ox-head presided over the Open Eyes ritual: he killed a black rooster, then filled about ten bowls with its blood, which the men on both sides drank down. Representatives from both sides each produced an almost-finished bamboo arrow, each made a cut on their arrow, then put the two together and broke them with their combined strength, to show that from today onwards they would no longer fight and kill each other-each side took the broken arrow as a pledge. Finally, each side asked an old widow, someone without sons, grandsons, or any descendants, to step forward. A bowl of clear water, in which had been put a copper coin, was placed in their hands, out of which they fished the money, then slowly rubbed it over the eyes of the other widow. One said: "Ma Yanwu's family did your people wrong, you mustn't cover your eyes, you must open your eyes, from now on there will be harmony…" The other one said: "Hu Kuiyuan's family's same-pot brothers did your people wrong, you mustn't cover your eyes, you must open your eyes, from now on there will be harmony…"
They started to mumble a song:
Everyone has a mouth The ways of the right are many. Everyone has two ears. The ways of the right last through the years. Open your eyes today, see clearly tomorrow, Dear brothers, young and old, start to smile. Today we meet, tomorrow we part, Although separated by mountains and rivers, we are all under the same heaven…
The more wretchedly poor the woman, the more qualified she was to be the eye-opening person on an occasion like this. No one could explain why it had to be like this.
After the eyes had been opened, both sides immediately returned to calling each other brother; no one, under any circumstances, could ever bring up this phase of enmity again. In other words, all the whys and wherefores, all the enmity (or lack thereof) had been completely washed away by a bowl of water run off from the eaves.
In our present, new era, of course, the phrase "open eyes" has taken on more and more new implications. The Ox-head will discuss the here-and-nows of the national situation, the Asian Games to be held in China or family planning, for example, as a preamble to opening eyes. Both parties concerned have to give the Oxhead a red envelope (of money), not like it was in the past, when a pig's snout was enough as a thank-you gift. Both parties also have to pay "worry costs" to those who've watched the conflict unfold firsthand: heavy costs meant providing a meal, light costs meant a packet of cigarettes. Some of the young men who'd hung out with Kuiyuan had had their heads together in continual discussion over the last few days, waiting for this to happen. It was as if they were wanting to do something, but couldn't say what they wanted to do, so in the end they did nothing. They were like moths drawn to the light, always heading for where the action was, their faces masks of concern for everything, expressing a desire to put the world to rights, but when they arrived someplace, they'd have a directionless drink of tea, a directionless smoke and assemble in directionless twos and threes, casting frequent, knowing glances or smiles at each other. Someone might suddenly get up and yell "Let's go!," which might have led an outsider to believe something was about to happen. But nothing would in fact happen: the gang of them would go and have a look at a small shop, change the tree they were sitting under, resume their waiting in groups of twos and threes, scrap among themselves over the odd cigarette-nothing more.
And that was how they worried about Maqiao for several days until finally receiving their reward: Yanwu sent someone off to buy a few cigarettes and some packs of cold drinks to keep their mouths happy; and that took care of them.
They'd originally planned to go take a look at Kuiyuan's house, but when they got there they bumped into someone called Huangbao, who blocked the road and gave them an earful. Not knowing much about him, they exchanged knowing glances and raised their eyebrows at each other until someone gave another shout of "Let's go!"-they all roared with laughter, then left.
*Standing the Body
: Kuiyuan had been adopted by the Hu family, but as he hadn't yet pressed names he didn't count as having formally entered the clan, so he was buried in Maqiao. A little big brother of his, one Fangying, who'd been married off in faraway Pingjiang County near the Luo River, hurried back when she heard the news, to weep before her little brother's coffin. She hadn't been present at the eye-opening, and would under no circumstances accept a single cent from Yanwu's family. Not only this, she even said she wouldn't let Kuiyuan go under the ground and kept guard in front of the grave, wouldn't let anyone touch it with a hoe. She asked a few people to help her put the coffin vertically upright, propping it up at the sides with a few pieces of rock.
This was called "standing the body." Standing the body was a way of voicing a grievance, a way of attracting the attention of ordinary people and of officials. The stones heaped around the coffin signified that the grievance was as vast as the mountains themselves. The upright position of the coffin, then, signified the resolution that while the grievance hadn't been fully voiced, the dead wouldn't lie still, that they were sworn not to enter the ground. Deaf to what she heard from others, Fangying had decided in her own mind that her brother had died unjustly, that he'd been persecuted to his end by Yanwu's henchmen.
She even broadcast throughout the village that she'd give 10,000 yuan as a reward to whomsoever helped her rehabilitate Kuiyuan and redress the injustice. If they didn't want the money and wanted her instead, that was fine also: she'd be a contract wife for a year, wouldn't charge anything for her labor, for doing the housework and producing children during that year. All she wanted was her body back in one piece after a year.
*Uh
: Back in the days of the Cultural Revolution, the commune ordered each stockade to dig air-raid shelters, also called war-preparation caves. The Soviet Union, apparently, was going to fight down from the north, America was going to fight up from the south, and Taiwan was going to fight over from the east, so all the war-preparation caves had to be dug before the full moon was up. It was also said a very, very large bomb indeed had already been launched from the Soviet Union and in another day or two it'd fall on us here-if our planes couldn't bring it down, that is. The team leader had no choice but to organize three revolving shifts to work on the job day and night, to keep a step ahead of the World War. Generally speaking, two men and one woman were allocated to each shift, the men to take care of digging and carrying the earth, the woman, weaker than the other two, to take care of the topsoil. And so it was that Fangying, grasping a hoe with a sawed-off handle hoe, accompanied Fucha and me into the cave.
The war-preparation cave was very small, so narrow it only permitted two people to pass by at one time. The farther in we dug, the dimmer the rays of light became, and very soon we needed the light of an oil lamp. To save oil, we lit only a tiny lamp which illuminated a small, dusky circle around where the pickaxe fell, leaving everywhere else shrouded in boundless darkness. You could only figure out your surroundings by sounds and smells: whether your partner had returned from carrying earth, whether he'd put down his bamboo hat to wait, whether he'd brought some tea or something to eat, for example. Of course, in a tiny space like this, you very easily picked up the smell of other people's bodies, distinct from the smell of lamp smoke: the smell of a woman's sweat, her hair, her saliva, for example-and some rather less specific male smells besides.
After digging for a few hours, you started to shake and sway. Several times I felt my own face bumping accidentally into another face that streamed with sweat, or brushed by a few long strands of twisted hair. As I gently moved my numbed legs while coming back out of the digging position, whenever my concentration slipped I might collide with a leg somewhere behind me in the darkness, or with a bosom-I could sense its soft fullness, and how it dodged away in panic.
Fortunately, it was very hard to get a
good look at the other person's face. The flickering dusky light illuminated the mud wall your nose was rammed up against, illuminated the eternal, inescapable fate that lay before you, illuminated the dense accumulations of pickaxe marks that swarmed at you everywhere, reflecting back in places a few rays of yellow light.
It made me think of how our forefathers had described hell.
There was no difference between day and night down here, no difference between summer and winter, no recollection even of the outside world far, far away. Only accidental collisions with another sweat-streamed face startled you awake: you discovered you still existed, you were still a person, an actual person with forename and surname, for example, with a gender. For the first few days, after we'd just started, Fangying and I still managed to find a few things to talk about. But after a few startled collisions, she said no more; the most I'd get out of her was a grunted "uh." I later discovered her "uh's" covered an enormous spectrum of tones and degrees of vehemence, could express doubt, assent, even anxiety or refusal. "Uh" represented the absolute concentration of her language, an endlessly various piece of rhetoric, an inexhaustible sea of meaning.
I also noticed that she'd begun to take care to avoid collisions, that the sounds of her panting were often a long way from where I was. But every time we got off work, she'd quietly pick up clothes I'd forgotten in the cave and stuff them into my hands at an appropriate moment. When eating, she'd add two or three sweet potatoes to my bowl, while her bowl remained almost empty. And finally, as I was kneeling on the ground, sweating away, every tendon straining, I'd feel a billow of coolness on my back-a towel would mop my glistening spine.
"Leave it…" The sweat had got up my nose, stopped me finishing my sentence.
The towel lightly mopped my face.
"I don't need…"
I ducked my face away, tried to block the towel. But in the darkness, my hand wouldn't follow orders and missed the towel, ended up grabbing- after a couple of fumbles mid-air-a hand. It was only a long time after the event itself that I remembered this hand was small and soft. No, I should correct that: memories like this are imaginings, conjectures after the event. In reality, when you reach the point when physical strength is totally used up, the point when your panting is overdrawn on future panting, gender no longer exists. Chance touches are not only no longer startling: you lose all sense of touch whatsoever. Grabbing a woman's hand becomes no different from grabbing a handful of mud. Staggering, swaying, I might have brushed against her shoulder, might even have stroked her back, there might have been other might-have-beens, and others besides, but I've no memory left of this, no solid proof.
I believe that, at this moment, she too had lost her sense of touch, of shyness and reserve, that all emotional abstraction had been puffed and panted out. This is the first and only time in my life so far that I've experienced de-gendering like this.
Afterwards, as I gradually recovered my energy, she recovered her gender and retreated far, far away.
Later still, she got married. Her parents valued sons over daughters and only let her finish primary school before sending her out to earn work points in the village; once they'd found a family that could afford to eat white rice they sent her packing. The day she was sent off to be married, dressed in a new pink jacket and a pair of fairly up-to-the-minute white tennis shoes, she stood there, thronged by a crowd of twittering girls. I don't know why, but she never cast a glance at me. She would certainly have heard my voice, certainly have known I was there, but for some unknown reason, she'd talk to anybody, meet anybody's eyes-but never took a glance at me. There was nothing between her and me, nothing secret. Apart from that time digging in the cave, there'd been no other contact between us to mention. There was nothing special to be said, beyond my later imaginings and conjectures that I'd felt that hand of hers, beyond her having had the opportunity to witness my greatest sufferings. No other woman in the world would ever be so close to me in the state I'd been in then, would see me lying there like a dog, dressed in a pair of shorts and nothing else, sometimes kneeling, sometimes on my side, my whole body bathed in mud and sweat, struggling, panting underground in a darkness utterly bereft of daylight, with only the eyes in my head to prove I was human, covered with dust and smoke particles snorted around my nostrils. She'd seen a look in my eyes that would return only in death, heard groans and pants I'd make again only on the point of death, smelled my body at its most intolerable-smelling. That was all.
Of course, she'd also heard my breathless sobs. Suffering furious abuse from Benyi, we'd wanted to get the cave dug to keep a step ahead of all the bombs of the imperialists, revisionists, and counterrevolutionaries. During that time, I must've hacked five or six pickaxes to pieces. Once, when I lost my concentration, the pickaxe slipped out of my grasp and dug into my own foot-it hurt so much I burst into tears.
She cried, too. As her hands flew to help me wrap the wound, a drop of cool water fell onto the back of my foot. It wasn't a drop of sweat, I guessed: it was a tear.
We'd hit a seam of the most rock-hard purple-teeth soil. It was no fault of hers she couldn't help me much. Neither was it any fault of hers she couldn't avoid seeing my pitiful, utterly humiliated condition. And neither, moreover, was it any fault of hers that she had no way of returning this, this secret between us, to me, and was forced to carry it off with her, far away.
Since points of extremity in a human lifetime are very rare, this secret took on correspondingly vast proportions, became a jewel of priceless value embedded in her memory. Maybe Fangying had realized this early on and it had produced in her a sense of horror at the thought of an unpaid loan or of having guzzled down something belonging to someone else, and maybe that was why she didn't dare glance at me when she left.
"Looks like rain, you'd better take an umbrella with you," someone said to her.
She nodded her head and pronounced an emphatic "uh."
I'd caught it: her "uh" spread its wings, flew over the crowd, over the heads of children grabbing at candied fruits, and straight into my ears- it wasn't a reply to the comment about the umbrella, of course: it was an expression of farewell, of well-wishing.
I didn't stick around till she set off, I didn't watch her three brothers haul her trousseau onto their shoulders and a new pot onto their backs, didn't watch those few kids accompany her in rowdy pursuit as she started off on her long journey. I went to the hillside behind the mountain, sat down, listened to the whispering of the wind among the leaves, and gazed at the autumn leaves filling the mountains, watching and waiting for me. The sound of the flute playing to the departing bride suddenly rose up so loud that all the autumn grasses around started to tremble and sway, before they were drowned out of view by the tears in my eyes. I had lots of reasons to cry, of course. I was crying that my family had forgotten me (I hadn't even gotten a letter from them on my birthday), I was crying about a friend's negligence at a critical time for me (this friend, off to enjoy himself in town, had carelessly lost an urgent letter I'd nagged him about again and again, an urgent letter that concerned my future job prospects). And, of course, I was also crying about this bride, a bride who bore no relation to me whatsoever, who never could bear any relation to me, who'd been banished by the sound of the flute, her pink jacket lost to a distant and unknown family, taking those worthless "uh's" of hers away from me forever.
When I next saw her again, many years later, she was rather thinner and her face had taken on the ashen flatness of middle age. If someone standing next to me hadn't introduced us, I'd have had great difficulty making out the lines of her face as it had been all those years back. She stared momentarily, a dim flicker of recognition in her eyes, before her gaze swiftly flitted from my face. Her mind was on other things. A rural cadre who'd come to the village the same time I had was sorting out the civil dispute between her and Yanwu's family, sorting out her mother's and her younger brother's funerals, and criticizing her for running back to her parents' home to cry grievances for her
brother by standing his body (see the entry for "Standing the Body"). "What more's there to say? Why won't you let the dead rest, why d'you want to make them stand! When someone's dead, doesn't matter how much fuss you make, it won't bring them back to life, doesn't matter whether you're right or wrong, no sense in making a fuss!" The cadre spoke in tones of such vexed admonition that even her brothers nodded in agreement; only she fell with a thump to her knees and, before the rural cadre had worked out what she was doing, bashed out a whole series of resonant kowtows. Two women nearby hurried forward to pull her up, tugging and yanking at her, but her face, glistening, awash with tears, kept bobbing and struggling between upright and kneeling positions as complaints continued to stream from her mouth.
Only when the women pulled her away were her hoarse sobs finally released. She had perfectly good reasons for crying, of course: for her mother and brother (who'd just passed away, who'd died in unfortunate circumstances), that there was no way she could seek redress on her own (even her little brother couldn't help her out). In my opinion, though, her sobs were perhaps even more than that, were a kind of secret reciprocation directed toward me. Twenty years, it had been, twenty years: she must have heard my sorrow on the mountainside twenty years ago, and now the tears were fighting their way unstoppably out of her eyes, trying to repay a debt of tears that could never be spoken of out loud.
The autumn grasses that filled the mountainside were a testimony to this debt of tears. They swayed in the wind, nodding in waves toward the summit. Maybe they'd silently soaked up too many human sobs, maybe that was why they'd declined into shrunken, withered reeds.
All these years later, I revisited what had formerly been the war-preparation cave. The world war had never been fought in the end. The one we'd dug had been converted into a storage cellar for potato seeds; because it was damp, the cave walls had grown green moss and the smell of moldering sweet potatoes floated from the mouth of the cave. But circular smoke stains lingered, in a few hollows where we'd placed the oil lamp.