The Garlic Ballads

by Mo Yan

  1.

  Gao Yang stretched out on the prison cot and was asleep before he’d pulled up the covers. Then came the nightmares, one after the other. First he dreamed of a dog gnawing leisurely on his ankle, chewing and licking as if it wanted to bleed him dry and consume the marrow in his bones. He tried to kick the dog away, but his leg wouldn’t move; he tried to reach out and punch it, but he couldn’t lift his arm. Then he dreamed he was locked in an empty room at the production brigade for burying his mother instead of delivering her to the crematorium. Two members of the “four bad categories”—landlords, counterrevolutionaries, rich peasants, and criminals—carried her into the house at ten o’clock at night. Her head was shiny as a gourd, her front teeth missing, her mouth bloodied. When he lit a lamp and asked what had happened, they just looked at him pitifully before turning and walking silently out the door. He laid her on the kang, wailing and gnashing his teeth. She opened her eyes, and her lips quivered, as if she wanted to speak; but before she could say a word, her head lolled to the side and she was dead. Grief-stricken, he threw himself on her.…

  A large hand clamped down over his mouth. He wrenched his head free, spitting saliva in all directions. The hand fell away.

  “What’s all the screaming about, my boy?” The question, in a low, somber voice, emerged from beneath two phosphorescent dots.

  He was awake now, and he knew what had happened. A light from the sentry box lit up the corridor, where a guard paced nervously.

  He sobbed. I dreamed about my mother.”

  Chuckles emerged from beneath the dots. “You’d have been better off dreaming about your wife,” came the voice.

  The dots went out, returning the cell to darkness. But the old inmate’s sputtering snores, the young one’s greedy lip-smacking, and the middle-aged one’s demonic gasps kept him awake.

  The mosquitoes, having sucked up all the blood they could handle, were resting on the walls, and at some time after midnight the buzzing stopped altogether. He covered himself with a blanket that suddenly seemed to move on its own—an army of insects began crawling over his skin. Gasping from fear and disgust, he flung the blanket away; but that only brought back the cold air, and the blanket was the lesser of the two evils. The middle-aged inmate giggled in his sleep.

  Mother’s head lolled to the side and she was dead. No last words. It was July, the stifling dog days of summer. But that night it rained, creating puddles that attracted croaking frogs. Water dripped noisily from the straw roof long after the rain had stopped. Shortly after dawn he rummaged around until he found a tattered blanket to wrap his mother in; then, laying her over his shoulder, he picked up a shovel and slipped out of the village. He had already decided not to bury her in the local cemetery, since that was where poor and lower-middle-class peasants wound up—he couldn’t bury her among people like that, for fear that their ghosts would harass her—and he couldn’t afford to take her to the county crematorium.

  On and on he walked, his dead mother over his shoulder, until he reached a plot of land between Paradise and Pale Horse counties that belonged to no one he knew of. Weeds and other wild vegetation were the only signs of life. After wading across Following Stream, whose rapid, chest-deep waters nearly claimed him and his mother, he laid the rolled blanket containing her body on the other side of the stream. Her head poked out. Lightly falling raindrops splashed into her open mouth and eyes, skittering across her taut, shiny face. Her feet stuck out the other side. One of her badly worn shoes had fallen off along the way; the bare foot, ghosdy pale and shaped like the horn of an ox, was coated with mud. As Gao Yang fell to his knees, dry wails split his throat, but he shed no tears even though a knife seemed to be gouging out his heart.

  After scouting the area and choosing a spot on a rise, he picked up his shovel and began to prepare the grave site. First he cleared away the weeds, with dirt clods still stuck to the roots, and placed them carefully to the side. Then he started digging. When the hole was chest-deep, water began seeping up through the gray sandy soil. So he carried the body over next to the new grave, laid it on the ground, and fell to his knees. “Mother,” he said loudly, after kowtowing three times, “it’s raining, and water is seeping into the hole. I can’t afford a coffin, so this worn blanket will have to do. Mother, you … you’ll have to make do.”

  With great care he laid her in the hole, then gathered up some fresh green grass to cover her face. That done, he began shoveling dirt into the hole, stopping occasionally to tap it down so as not to leave telltale signs. Still, the idea of jumping on his mother’s body brought tears to his eyes and a buzzing to his ears. Finally he retrieved the weeds and wild grasses and replanted them where they’d been, just as rain clouds gathered overhead and bolts of blood-red lightning split the dark clouds. A cold wind swept past the wildwood and into fields planted with sorghum and corn, setting the leaves dancing in the air like snapping banners of silk. Standing beside the grave, Gao Yang looked around one last time: a river to the north, a large canal to the east, a seemingly endless broad plain to the west, and misty Little Mount Zhou to the south. The surroundings put him at ease. Again he knelt down, kowtowed three times, and said softly, “Mother, you have a good spot here.”

  By the time he was on his feet, his sadness was gone, except for an occasional pang in his chest. Shovel in hand, he forded the river, heading back; the water, which had risen precipitously, was now above his chin.

  The young inmate groped his way over to the window, yanked open the tiny door in the wall, and pissed into the plastic pail, his splashing urine adding to the cell’s rank odor. Fortunately, the window glass had long since been smashed and cleared away; there was a small opening at the bottom of the door where the food was passed in, and the ceiling had a small skylight, all of which admitted some cool night breezes from the outside, making the air inside tolerable.

  Wiping his mind clean of all extraneous thoughts, he concentrated on his reveries.

  Heaven and earth had turned a misty gray, and the wet pounding noise of rain falling violendy on branch and trunk rose from the wild-wood. Once he was safely home, he stripped naked, wrung most of the water out of his tattered clothes, and hung them up to dry. The room leaked terribly—water was everywhere, especially at the junction of eaves and mud walls, where rivulets of dirty scarlet ran down to the muddy floor. He tried to catch the drips with an array of pots and pans, but resigned himself to sitting on the edge of the kang and letting the water go where it wanted.

  Stretching out on his back, he gazed through the barred window at a faint strip of sky.

  This is the unluckiest time of my life, he mused. Father is dead, Mother has joined him, and my roof leaks.

  He stared up at the grimy, greasy roof beam until his attention was caught by a mouse crouching on the stove after being driven out of hiding by the rain. He thought about hanging himself from the roof beam, but lacked the resolve.

  When the rain stopped and the sun came out, he put on his damp clothes and, expecting the worst, went outside to see how his roof, pitted and weakened by the rain, was holding up. Gao Jinglong, the local police chief, came charging into the yard just then, leading seven militiamen armed with .38-caliber rifles. They wore black rain boots and conical hats woven of sorghum stalks, and had draped fertilizer sacks over their shoulders; they advanced like a moving wall.

  “Gao Yang,” the police chief said, “Secretary Huang wants to know if you secretly buried your mother, that ancient member of the landlord class.”

  Gao Yang was stunned by how quickly the news had spread and amazed that the production brigade would be so concerned about one of their deceased members. “In rainy weather like this,” he said, “she’d have started to stink if I’d waited. … How was I supposed to get her to town in pouring rain like that?”

  “I didn’t come here to argue,” the police chief said. “You can plead your case with Secretary Huang.”

  “Uncle …” Gao Yang clasped his hands, lowered his head,
and bowed at the waist. “Uncle … cant you just let me go?”

  “Get moving. Doing what you’re told is your only chance of staying out of trouble,” Gao Jinglong said.

  A beefy man walked up and prodded him with his rifle butt. “Get moving, my boy.”

  Gao Yang turned to the man. “Anping, we’re like brothers.

  Anping prodded him again. “I said get going. The ugly bride has to meet her in-laws sooner or later.”

  A table had been set up in the brigade office. Secretary Huang sat behind it smoking a cigarette. The glaring red of posters and slogans papering the walls terrified Gao Yang. His teeth chattered as he stood in front of the table.

  Secretary Huang smiled genially. “Gao Yang, you’ve sure got nerve.”

  “Master … I …” His legs buckled, and he was on his knees.

  “Get up!” Secretary Huang demanded. “Who’s your master?”

  “Get your ass up!” ordered the police chief, who kicked him.

  He stood up.

  “Are you aware of the regulation to send all bodies to the crematorium?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you knowingly broke the law?”

  “Secretary Huang,” Gao Yang defended himself, “it was pouring out there. … I live so far from town, and can’t afford the cremation fee @ or an urn for the ashes. I figured I’d have to bury them when I got home, anyway. That takes up space in the field, too.”

  “Well, aren t you a paragon of reason!” Secretary Huang said sarcastically. “The Communist Party is no match for you.”

  “No, Secretary Huang. What I meant was—”

  “I don’t want to hear another word from you!” Secretary Huang banged the table and jumped to his feet. “Go dig up your mother and take her straight to the crematorium.”

  “Secretary Huang, I beg you, please dont…” He was back on his knees, crying and pleading. “My mother suffered her whole life. Death was a release for her. Now that she’s in the ground, let her lie there in peace—”

  Secretary Huang cut him off. “Gao Yang, you d better straighten out your thinking! Your mother enjoyed a life of leisure and luxury by exploiting others. It was only proper that she be reeducated and reformed through labor after Liberation. Now that she’s dead, cremation is just as proper. That’s what will happen to me when I die.”

  “But Secretary Huang, she told me that before Liberation she wouldn’t even allow herself a single meal of stuffed dumplings, and that she’d get up before dawn, whether she’d had enough sleep or not, to earn money to buy land.”

  “Are you asking to have the party’s verdict overturned?” an enraged Secretary Huang demanded. “Are you saying that land reform was a mistake?”

  A rifle butt thudded into the back of Gao Yang’s head. Golden flowers danced before his eyes as he fell forward, his face banging the brick floor.

  A militiaman jerked him to his feet by his hair so the police chief could smack him across both cheeks with a shiny wooden switch. Crack! Crack!—loud and crisp.

  “Lock him up in the west wing,” the police chief said. “Dai Zijin, call an immediate meeting of the branch-committee members here in the office—use the PA system.”

  Gao Yang was locked in an empty room in the west wing of the brigade headquarters, under the watchful eye of two armed militiamen sitting on a bench across from him. Thunder rolled outside, and the skies sent buckets of rain thudding into the leaves of parasol trees in the compound and onto the red-tiled roof in a deafening cadence.

  The loudspeakers crackled for a moment, then sent forth the voice of Dai Zijin. Gao Yang knew the names released into the air.

  “Gao Yang,” one of the militiamen said, “you re in big trouble this time.”

  “Little Uncle,” replied Gao Yang, “I didn’t bury my mother on brigade land.”

  “What you did with her body isn’t what this is all about.”

  “What is it all about?” he asked fearfully.

  “Aren t you trying to get the verdict on her reversed?”

  “I only told the truth. Everybody knows that. My father was a famous skinflint who only cared about saving up money to buy land. He’d beat my mother if she bought an extra turnip.”

  “You’re wasting your time telling me,” the militiaman said indifferently.

  That evening, in spite of the heavy rainfall, a meeting of all brigade members was held, and although Gao Yang eventually forgot most of the particulars, he would always remember the sound of the rain and the shouted slogans, which continued without letup from early evening to late at night.

  The following morning a squad of militiamen tied Gao Yang to a bench and placed four bricks strung together with hemp around his neck; it felt like a piece of garroting wire that would lop off his head if he so much as moved. Then in the afternoon the police chief tied his thumbs together with a piece of wire and strung him up from a steel overhead beam. He didn’t feel much pain, but the moment his feet left the ground, sweat seemed to squirt from every pore in his body.

  “Now tell us, where’s the landlord’s wife buried?”

  He shook his head, which swelled with images of a weed-covered plot of land and a swollen stream. The clumps of grass he had dug up and replanted had been soaking up rain all this time, until they must look as if they had never been moved. His footprints, too, would have been washed away by the rain; so long as he kept his mouth shut, Mother could rest in peace. He vowed never to reveal his secret, not if it cost him his life.

  Not that his determination remained rock-solid the whole time: he screamed in agony when the police chief rammed a thorny branch several inches up his ass: “Uncle, spare me, please … I’ll take you there“

  The bloody branch was removed and he was lowered from the steel beam. “Where’s she buried?”

  He looked into the police chief’s dark face, then peeked down at his own body, and finally gazed out the window at the misty sky. “Mother,” he said, “wait for me, I’ll be there soon….” Lowering his head, he made a mad dash for the wall, but was restrained by two militiamen.

  Indignation filled his heart. “Brothers,” he shouted hoarsely, “I—Gao Yang—have always done what’s right, ever since I was a little boy. There’s no bad blood between us, so why are you doing this to me?”

  The police chief stopped hitting him, but then the traces of sympathy in his eyes were driven out by his stern response: “We’re talking about class struggle here!”

  Since Gao Yang was to be detained that night, the militiamen carried two benches into the room. The plan was to sleep in turns, but before the night was very far gone, they were both snoring.

  The window frame in the otherwise vacant room was made of wood, so if he wanted to run away, a well-placed kick would do the trick. But he neither felt like escaping nor had the leg strength to smash the window frame. The police chief’s branch had so swollen his rectum that he couldn’t pass the gas that was making his belly bulge and his guts swell. A kerosene lamp hung from the roof beam, its shade turned black by an accumulation of smoke that dimmed the light and cast a shadow the size of a millstone on the brick floor. When he looked at the two militiamen, clutching their rifles to their chests as they slept, fully dressed, he felt guilty for putting them to all this trouble. Once or twice he thought about snatching one of the rifles from its owner, smashing the window with the butt, and making his getaway into the yard. But it was a fleeting thought at most, replaced each time with a conviction that his punishment was simply the price he must pay to keep his mother from the flames of the crematorium. He’d just have to grit his teeth and bear whatever came along. Otherwise, she’d have suffered in vain.

  The militiamen had slept like babies, but not him. Just like tonight—his cellmates were fast asleep, but he wasn’t the least bit drowsy after awaking from his nightmares.

  Stars blazed beyond the barred window above parasol-tree leaves and roof tiles that found their voices under a light drizzle. But there was another sound, too, a
distant roar that could only mean a floodtide in Following Stream to the south and Sandy River, north of the village. Inexplicably, he grew anxious for farmers in fields that would turn into swampland if the rivers overflowed their banks. Taller stalks might hold out for a few days, but the shorter ones were doomed.

  He curled up in the corner, his back pressed against the damp wall. Someone darted past the window, and a small paper bundle landed at his feet. He picked it up, unwrapped it, and was treated to a wonderful smell. It was a fried onion roll—still warm—and he had to fight to keep from bawling like a baby. Taking care not to disturb the sleeping militiamen, he nibbled at the onion roll, carefully chewing and swallowing each tasty bite. He had never before realized how noisy people are when they eat; heaven looked after him, he thought, since he managed to finish the roll without waking his guards.

  After finishing the onion roll, Gao Yang again felt that life was worth living. So he closed his eyes and slept for a couple of hours, until he had to piss. Then, neither daring nor caring to awaken the militiamen, he searched for a mouse hole in which he could quietly relieve himself. Unfortunately, the brigade buildings all had brick floors, and he couldn’t find even a good-sized crack, let alone a mouse hole. To his surprise he found an empty wine bottle, which served his purpose just fine. But he hadn’t figured on the noise—like tossing rocks into a canyon— and he held back as much as possible to keep from disturbing his guards. Froth spilled over the neck of the bottle long before it was full, so he stopped the flow to let it subside before continuing; he repeated the process—three times in all—until the bottle was brimming. Then, holding it by its neck, he placed it in the corner, where it caught the dim light of dawn just enough to highlight the label. Quickly realizing that the militiamen couldn’t miss it there, he moved it to another corner. Just as noticeable. So he put it on the windowsill. Even worse.

  Just then one of them woke up. “What are you doing?”