The Garlic Ballads

by Mo Yan

  Gao Yang pressed his back hard against the gray wall to lessen the pressure on his bladder as much as possible. He observed that the middle-aged inmate was the only one who was confident about eating in front of him. The other two stood in separate corners, faces to the wall, bent over at the waist, necks scrunched down between their shoulders, holding their steamed buns with both hands against their abdomens, as if the buns were living objects that would scamper away if they loosened their grip. The would-be killer wolfed his food down, the young inmate chewed his food slowly and thoroughly, while the old man broke chunks off his steamed bun with trembling fingers and rolled them into doughy pellets, which he popped into his mouth and washed down with a mouthful of soup. His hands never stopped shaking, as if he were excited, or agitated, or nervous; and as he ate, a gummy liquid oozed from his festering tear ducts, under lids that no longer had any lashes.

  The middle-aged inmate grunted between bites. The young one smacked his lips. By the time the middle-aged inmate had finished off the last bite of his bun, the old man was tossing the final doughy pellet into his mouth, and the young man smacked his lips for the last time. Then they exchanged hurried glances, lowered their heads, and slurped their soup.

  The sounds produced a conditioned reflex in Gao Yang: the pressure against an invisible valve grew with each slurp, and the warm urine behind it seemed about to gush forth. His ears filled with garlicky soup sounds: slurping and tumbling inside his eardrums, straining against the walls of his bladder, swelling his urethra. For a brief moment he heard a fine watery spray and felt a warm liquid against his thighs.

  After his cellmates had finished off their soup, the old one held his bowl in trembling hands and licked the bottom with his thick, purplish tongue, round and round. Then, still holding their bowls, all three men gaped at Gao Yang: his face was bathed in sweat—he could feel it puddling on his eyebrows—and he knew he must look like a wild man.

  “Are you sick, buddy?” the middle-aged inmate asked crudely.

  Gao Yang, too far gone to speak by then, concentrated every ounce of energy on an invisible valve that existed somewhere in his mind.

  “There’s a jailhouse doctor, you know,” the man said.

  Gao Yang doubled over and clutched his belly, then dragged himself to the door, where he was wracked by a urine shudder. He stood on his tiptoes, as if that could hold the valve in place, then banged the door with his fist. It clanged loudly.

  Footsteps in the corridor—running—a guard. Gao Yang thought he heard the rifle butt rub against the guard’s pants as he ran. He kept banging on the door.

  “What’s going on in there?” the guard yelled through the bars.

  “We’ve got a sick man in here,” the middle-aged man replied.

  “Who is it?”

  “Number Nine.”

  “No … not sick.” Gao Yang looked bashfully at his cellmates. “Have to pee … can’t hold it any longer—”

  The middle-aged inmate shouted, intentionally drowning out Gao Yang’s complaint. “Open up, he’s at death’s door!”

  The rattìe of keys, the bolt thrown back—clang—the door swung open. The guard held a rifle in his left hand and the keys in his right. “What’s the matter, Number Nine?”

  Gao Yang bent over. “Comrade,” he said, “I have to pee … comrade

  The guard, his face twisted in anger, kicked Gao Yang and forced him back into the cell. “Prick!” he cursed. “Who are you calling comrade?”

  The door clanged shut.

  Gao Yang banged his head against the door. “I didn’t mean ‘comrade,’” he wailed. “I meant ‘Officer,’ Officer Officer Officer—let me out, I can’t hold it back … can’t hold it back.…”

  “You’ve got a chamber pot in there, you prick!” the guard shouted from the other side of the door. “Use it.”

  Still holding his belly, Gao Yang spun around and, to the delight of his cellmates, flitted from one end of the cell to the other, searching for the chamber pot.

  “Uncle … Elder Brother … Younger Brother … where is the chamber pot? Where is it?” He wept as he looked under all three cots; drops of urine oozed out each time he bent over.

  His cellmates looked on and laughed.

  “I can’t hold it back,” he sobbed. “I really can’t.”

  The valve opened, releasing a blast of warm urine. His mind went blank as his legs began to quake and all the muscles in his body went slack. His legs felt scalded as that thing of his shuddered; he experienced the greatest sense of relief he had ever known.

  The urine puddled at his feet, forming lovely patterns on the floor. “Hey, you, get the chamber pot for him, and hurry,” the iniddle-aged inmate snapped. “There’s probably more where that little bit came from.”

  The young man dashed over to the wall, opened a tiny gray door beneath the window, and fished out a black plastic chamber pot. A foul stench filled the cell. “Piss in that, and be quick about it,” he said, giving Gao Yang a shove.

  Gao Yang took it out with fumbling fingers and aimed it at the chamber pot. Revulsed by what he saw inside, he let go and made loud splashes as the stream hit. It was music to his ears. With enormous relief he closed his eyes, wishing he could listen to that sound forever.

  A slap on the neck brought him rudely out of his trance. He had emptied his bladder in the chamber pot, its top now foamy.

  “Go on, put it back inside,” the middle-aged man commanded.

  He did as he was told, depositing the chamber pot in the wall and closing the little wooden door behind it.

  Now, with the cell smelling like an outhouse and his cellmates glaring at him, he nodded apologetically and meekly sat down on his cot. He felt absolutely drained. His urine-soaked pant legs stuck uncomfortably to his skin, and the injury on his urine-spattered ankle stung painfully, bringing back memories of what had happened earlier that day: as he was walking out of the house, he spotted a clay-colored rabbit streaking out of the acacia grove; it stopped and, it seemed, looked straight at him. Unnerved, he recalled an old man’s assertion that if you see a wild rabbit the first thing in the morning, you’re bound to have bad luck all day long. The police came for him later that day…. These exhausting recollections seemed years old, not hours, and were covered by layers of dust.

  The old man, licking his lips and blinking his eyes, came up and asked shrilly, “You don’t want to eat?”

  Gao Yang shook his head.

  That’s all the old man needed to fall to his knees and scoop up the last steamed bun, then crawl up against the wall, his shoulders and head quaking. He purred like a cat that had just caught a mouse.

  With a sign from his middle-aged cellmate, the young inmate spun and leapt onto the old man’s back; his chance to avenge being hit by the ladle had arrived, and he pounded the old man’s ridiculous bald head with both fists. “You want something to eat?” he shouted from his perch on the old man’s back. “Here, I’ll give you something!”

  The two men rolled around on the floor, slugging each other and yelping and growling. That brought the guards running. A square-faced guard appeared at the window, raking his rifle butt loudly across the bars. “Are you pricks tired of living?” he snarled. “Is this what we get for feeding you? Well, if you don’t break it up right now, you’ll be on bread and water for three days!”

  Having made his point, he stomped noisily down the corridor back to his station.

  The two prisoners, one old, one young, glared at each other like combatants in a cockfight—one with hardly any feathers left, the other waiting for the first ones to grow in—trying to intimidate each other during a lull in the fighting. Still clutched in the old inmate’s palsied grip was the steamed bun, his prize, and the cause of a number of cuts and bruises on his bald skull.

  “Hand over that bun, you old scoundrel,” the middle-aged inmate said in a controlled, authoritative voice.

  The trembling in the old man’s hands worsened as he pressed the steamed bun hard a
gainst his navel.

  “If you don’t,” the middle-aged inmate said menacingly, “I’ll stick your head in the chamber pot tonight and drown you!” Even in the fading light in the cell, the middle-aged inmate’s eyes seemed luminous.

  The old mans eyes pooled with tears; since there were no eyelashes to control the flow, the tears fairly gushed from ducts in the festering corners. Gao Yang saw this with great clarity. The old inmate slowly stretched out his arms until they were about eight inches from his body, then opened his hands. Gao Yang counted seven old fingers buried in the steamed bun, which had long since given up its original shape. The whimpering old man suddenly went crazy, ripping off a hunk of the bun and cramming it into his mouth. Then he flung what was left into the puddle of piss Gao Yang had been unable to hold back.

  “You want it? Then go get it!” he shrieked.

  The middle-aged inmate curled his lip and said, “Is that the way you want it, you mongrel prick?” He walked up and grabbed the man’s neck in a viselike grip. “Either you pick up that bun and eat it or I’ll soak your head in the chamber pot! You choose.”

  The old man’s eyes rolled back into his head.

  “Well, what’s it going to be?” the middle-aged man asked in measured tones.

  “I’ll eat… eat it,” the old man wheezed.

  The middle-aged inmate loosened his grip and turned to Gao Yang. “You don’t look like somebody who’s going to give me any trouble,” he snarled. “I expect you to do as I say, and what I want you to do now is lap up the piss you deposited on the floor.”

  2.

  “Come on, let’s see who can drink his own pee!” announced Wang Tai, a sixth-grader at the Gaotong Village elementary school in Paradise County’s Tree Trench Commune as he stood in the lavatory. It was the summer of 1960. Wang Tai, whose father was the leader of Gaotong Production Team Number 2, had a poor-peasant background.

  It was recess time. As soon as the bell rang, the students had swarmed out of the schoolhouse, merging into a single body until they reached the athletic field, where they split up by gender, with boys to the east and girls to the west. Weeds grew all over the athletic field, whose wooden basketball post sported a nice crop of edible fungus; the basket rims were rust red. A blue-eyed, bearded old billy goat tied to a wooden post on the eastern edge of the field stared at the gang of gaunt, wiry, wild children.

  The lavatories were located on the southern edge of the athletic field: two open-air structures, with the boys’ lavatory to the east and the girls’ to the west, separated by a low wall made of brick fragments. Gao Yang recalled that the wall barely cleared his head at the time. But Wang Tai, who was the oldest boy in the class, was as tall as the wall, so by standing on bricks he could see what was happening on the other side.

  Gao Yang thought back to the sight of Wang Tai standing on three bricks to peek over the wall into the girls’ lavatory. He also recalled what the boys’ lavatory looked like: a large brick-lined pit in the center, with boys standing on all four sides pissing at the same time. The clearing around the opening of the pit was dubbed “the precipice,” the innermost portion of which was shiny from the boys’ feet. Sleek black weeds and red rushes grew on the far edges, alongside purslanes, with their tiny yellow flowers.

  “Hey, everybody, don’t pee right away! Hold it, and we’ll see who can drink his own,” Wang Tai said from the precipice.

  Since the boys from grades one through five couldn’t squeeze up to the precipice, they watered the weeds and flowers on the outer edge, making them rustle loudly.

  “Who’s first?” Wang Tai asked. “Gao Yang, give it a try.”

  Gao Yang and Wang Tai belonged to the same production team. Wang Tai’s father was the team leader, while Gao Yang’s was a former landlord assigned to work under the supervision of poor and lower-middle-class peasants.

  “Okay, I’ll go first!” Gao Yang responded happily.

  A quarter of a century later, he still recalled the incident.

  Gao Yang had been only thirteen at the time, and even though their family had never had enough to eat or decent clothes to wear, by scrimping and saving, his folks kept him in school through the sixth grade. His father was a landlord, his mother a landlord’s wife. With that kind of background, all the talent in the world couldn’t help Gao Yang avoid the only path open to him—straight to Gaotong Production Team Number 2 as a worker under the supervision of Wang Tai’s father, and very soon. Gao Yang was pretty sure he’d never pass the middle-school entrance exam, even if he got perfect scores in every subject, which was impossible in any case. So naturally he was eager when Wang Tai gave him the chance to drink his own urine. Back then being noticed by others, for whatever reason, made him happy.

  When he said he’d try, he was confident he could do it. So he aimed his taut little pecker skyward and shot a stream of yellow piss straight up, way over his head. Quickly sticking his lips into the watery column, he took a big mouthful and swallowed it. Then he did it again.

  Wang Tai roared with laughter. “How’d it taste? How was it?”

  “Kind of like tea,” he lied.

  “Who else wants to try?” Wang Tai asked. “Who’s next?” No takers.

  Some of the smaller kids ran out onto the athletic field and shouted, “Come over here, quick! The sixth-graders are seeing who’ll drink his own pee!”

  Wang Tai turned to another of the sixth-graders. “Li Shuanzhu, go out there and take care of those little pussies.” Then he lowered his voice. “Hey, guys, do you know how girls pee?”

  They said they didn’t.

  Wang Tai spread his legs, squatted down, and made a hissing sound with his mouth. “Like that.”

  The sixth-graders shrieked in delight.

  Then Wang Tai lined them up on the west edge of the precipice. “Now we’ll see who can piss the highest,” he said. “The winner gets a prize.”

  A dozen or more students lined up, with Wang Tai at the head, and launched that many watery columns—some yellow and some white, some clear and some murky—into the air. Most crashed down on the wall dividing the boys’ and girls’ lavatories, but at least two landed on the other side. By far the most turbulent stream belonged to Wang Tai himself—Gao Yang was absolutely certain of that.

  A shriek erupted from the girls’ lavatory, followed by curses.

  Gao Yang couldn’t believe it when Wang Tai put the blame on him.

  The principal dragged Gao Yang into his office and smacked him in front of the teachers. “The sons of heroes are as solid as bricks, the sons of reactionaries are all little pricks,” he announced, before turning to one of the younger teachers. “Liu Yaohua, go to Gaotong Village and tell Wang Tai’s and Gao Yangs fathers I want to see them.”

  Gao Yang burst out crying, afraid his father would suffer again, all because of him.

  The old inmate scooped the bun out of Gao Yang’s piss and squeezed it with both hands; it made a bubbling sound as the gummy urine dripped through his gnarled, grimy fingers. After he’d squeezed it dry, he wiped his hands on his pants, then tore off a chunk and popped it into his mouth.

  “See, buddy, he’s eating it. Now, go on, drink up. It’s your own piss, so it can’t hurt you,” the grinning middle-aged inmate said, softly enough so the guards wouldn’t hear him.

  Gao Yang glared at the would-be murderer, feeling morally superior to someone for the first time in his life. Killer! Thief! Incestuous old bastard! When the poor and lower-middle-class peasants made me drink my own piss, I did it. And when the Red Guards made me drink it, I did it. But for common criminals like you? “I won’t do it!” he announced defiantly,

  “Are you sure about that?” the middle-aged inmate asked with a thin laugh.

  “I’m sure,” Gao Yang replied as he glanced at the old man, who was gobbling up the piss-soaked bun; he felt a wave of nausea rise in his throat.

  “You’d better do as he says, if you know what’s good for you,” the young inmate urged him.

 
“If the guards ordered me to drink it, I’d have no choice,” Gao Yang replied. “But I’ve done nothing to offend any of you.”

  “Maybe not,” the young man said sympathetically. “But rules are rules.”

  “Go on, drink,” the old inmate added his encouragement. “People have to learn how to deal graciously with humiliation. Look at me—I’m drinking your piss, aren’t I?”

  “I’m not the tyrant you think I am, friend,” the middle-aged inmate said earnestly. “Believe me, it’s for your own good.”

  Beginning to waver, Gao Yang was actually touched by the man’s apparent sincerity.

  “Go on, Little Brother, drink it,” the old man croaked, his throat filled with pieces of steamed bun.

  “Do as he says, Elder Brother,” the young cellmate urged him with watery eyes.

  Gao Yang’s nose began to ache—he was about to cry—and when he looked at the three criminals who shared his cell, he felt like a man whose loved ones were coaxing him into taking a dose of bitter medicine.

  “I’ll drink it … I’ll drink it…” His throat tightened until he couldn’t string together a complete sentence.

  “Good boy—that’s what I like to hear!” the middle-aged inmate said with a friendly pat on the shoulder.

  Gao Yang sank slowly to his knees on the cement floor in the middle of his own puddle of piss, which retained the enticing odor of garlic. As he closed his eyes, images of his father and mother drifted into his mind. Father wore a tattered conical rain hat, a scrawny tuft of hair peeking through the hole at the top. He was hunched over and was wheezing badly. Mother, struggling on tiny bound feet, was hauling a wagon uphill in the snow. Gao Yang quickly flattened his feverish lips against the cold cement floor. The smell of garlic—ah, the smell of garlic! He sucked up a mouthful of cool urine, and another, and a third … ah, the smell of garlic!

  The middle-aged man grabbed him by the shoulders and lifted him up. “Little Brother,” he said, “you can stop now.”

  After being led over to his cot, Gao Yang sat on the edge as if in a trance, not saying a word for about half as long as it takes to smoke a pipeful. A gurgle rose in his throat. Another long pause before his lips parted and he blurted out tearfully, “Father … Mother … today your son … drank his own piss … again.”