by Liu Zhenyun
She paused, then added, “If that’s not enough, then let the son of a bitch die a horrible death.”
5
Li Xuelian had planned for a two-month trial. Start to finish, it lasted all of twenty minutes. Wang Gongdao was the presiding judge, as the nameplate made clear. A judicial officer sat to his left, a court clerk to his right. A lawyer by the name of Sun represented the defendant, Qin Yuhe, who was not in attendance. Sun’s offices were next door to those of the lawyer Qian, who had drawn up Li Xuelian’s complaint. After the briefs were disposed of and the documents placed into evidence, each side stated its case and presented its witness list. The documents in evidence were two copies of a divorce decree, which the court determined was genuine. In stating her complaint, Xuelian told the court that the decree was a sham, after which Qin Yuhe’s lawyer read a statement prepared by Qin that the divorce approved the year before was legitimate. The first witness was a civil servant named Gu, who had handled the Li/Qin divorce the year before in Round the Bend Township. Gu had stood in the courtroom doorway, leaning against a post and listening attentively to the proceedings. When he was called, he stepped forward and announced that the decree was legitimate. He had enjoyed a perfect record in handling marriage and divorce cases for more than thirty years. An angry Xuelian disputed that:
“Old Gu, how can a man your age not recognize a sham divorce when he sees it?”
Gu, equally angry, replied:
“If that’s true, it can only mean that you two conspired to pull a fast one on me.” With a clap of his hands, he continued: “And that is nothing compared to pulling a fast one on the government with a phony divorce. He just read a statement from Qin Yuhe,” Gu continued, pointing to lawyer Sun, “who swore that it was legitimate.”
“How can you believe anything that bastard Qin Yuhe says?” Xuelian argued.
“If I can’t believe Qin Yuhe,” Gu said, “then I’ll believe you. During last year’s divorce proceedings, he said nothing. You were the only one who spoke. When I asked you why you wanted a divorce, you said the cause was alienation of affection. Are you saying now that your affections have been de-alienated? Since you haven’t seen each other for a year, how could you have patched things up? Qin Yuhe didn’t even show up in court today, which looks pretty alienated to me.”
Li Xuelian was at a loss for words.
“In all my fifty years and more,” Gu sputtered angrily, “I’ve never been tricked like this before! How will I be able to hold my head up in Round the Bend if this divorce is declared a sham?”
To all appearances, Li Xuelian was taking Gu, and not Qin Yuhe, to court.
Now that the documents had been admitted into evidence and the witnesses had had their say, the outcome was clear. Wang Gongdao banged his gavel, and Li Xuelian’s charge was dismissed. She stopped him as he was making his way out the door.
“How could you rule like that, Cousin?”
“That’s how the law works,” he said.
“It’s over, just like that? Even without Qin Yuhe?”
“The law allows for a lawyer to represent him in court.”
“I don’t understand,” Xuelian said, looking stunned, “how anyone could not see that it was a sham.”
Wang handed her the divorce decree.
“In the eyes of the law, this is perfectly legitimate. I told you so, but you wouldn’t listen.” He lowered his voice. “I didn’t bring up the matter of the child, for which you can thank me.”
“I lost the case, but you helped me out, is that what you’re saying?”
“You got it,” a bemused Wang replied.
6
Li Xuelian first met Dong Xianfa—Constitution Dong—in front of the county courthouse.
A standing member of the Judicial Committee, Dong was fifty-two, short and squat, with a pronounced paunch. He had worked in the courthouse for twenty years, following his discharge from the army and his return to the county to find work. At the time, there had been three job openings: one in the Bureau of Animal Husbandry, one in the Public Health Bureau, and one in the courthouse. The chief of the County Committee Organization Department thumbed through Dong Xianfa’s dossier.
“There isn’t anything in his file that points to a special talent, but his name alone—Constitution Dong—makes Judicial Committee the obvious choice. No livestock or public health for him.”
So off to the courthouse he went. In the army he had risen to the level of battalion commander, so he was designated a presiding judge. Ten years later he was elevated to membership on the Judicial Committee. Spoken of as a promotion, the judicial establishment viewed it as a demotion, for it was an administrative position with no real power. His salary and benefits were that of a deputy chief justice, but he was not a deputy chief justice. His authority to hear and decide cases, use government vehicles, and sign his name to be compensated for expenses was inferior to that of a presiding judge. In a word, Dong Xianfa, a one-time presiding judge, had been kicked upstairs. He spent the next ten years on the Judicial Committee, and had nearly reached retirement age. Twenty years earlier, his superiors, both the chief and his deputy, had been older than him. Those he worked under now were younger. In terms of age, Dong Xianfa was considered a veteran who, in twenty years, had made it only as far as the Judicial Committee, and for that his colleagues held him in low esteem. And no one held him in lower esteem than he himself. His colleagues’ lack of respect for him was evident in normal times; his low self-esteem emerged during critical moments. On the several occasions when he ought to have been promoted to deputy chief, he had failed to “strike while the iron was hot.” It was common knowledge that a member of the Judicial Committee was closer to deputy chief than was a presiding judge. But other presiding judges had been promoted over him, while he remained stuck where he was. Aren’t critical moments more important than normal times? And don’t normal times accumulate until a critical moment is reached? Yet nothing was more critical than his colleagues’ view that he had failed to be promoted because he was ineffective, while he attributed the cause to his principled nature. He had, he believed, failed because he was not a toady, he did not send gifts to important people, and he was incorruptible. When what was just and proper led to sadness and despair, Dong simply muddled along. Even more to the point was the fact that he disliked legal work. Not because he felt it was unimportant, but because, even as a child, he had preferred bringing things together over moving things apart, and the daily business of law was taking things apart. No one ever came to court when things were going well. Medicine supplies a fine analogy: doctors treat the sick, not the well. Hospitals need patients, courtrooms need disputes. Absent sickness and disputes, hospitals and courtrooms would have to close up shop. Dong Xianfa simply felt that he was in the wrong line of work. In his view, being a livestock broker, bartering over the price of an animal, fit him better than adjudicating cases at law. But a standing member of the Judicial Committee could not simply step down and start selling livestock. That might not have bothered him, but the rest of the world would have gone nuts, certain that he’d lost his mind. So day in and day out he performed his committee work, and was, as a result, miserable. Others attributed his despondence to not having been promoted in twenty years, and when they were out drinking they lamented the injustice he suffered. Dong shared his colleagues’ sense of injustice over his lack of advancement, but mainly he wished he could be a broker in the livestock market. Worst of all, he could tell no one why he was miserable, and so, as he muddled along, he developed hostility toward his surroundings and the people who inhabited them. All this wore him down until his favorite activity outside of working hours was boozing.
Back when he’d first been assigned to the Judicial Committee, its members did examine cases, which involved him in the legal process. Plaintiffs and defendants often invited him out for drinks, and as time wore on, people noticed that while he examined and intervened in cases from time to time, he never wielded a gavel. That kept his status
below that of an ordinary judge, let alone one who presided, and so no one felt a need to chat him up. When invitations stopped coming from participants in cases, Dong could go drinking with his colleagues, but they knew he was just killing time till he retired, since he obviously wasn’t going anywhere. Who wanted to go drinking with someone with no future? Drinking invitations were a daily occurrence, but no one included him in the outings. That was a hard pill to swallow, and eventually he was reduced to hanging around the courthouse to find drinking partners. When plaintiffs and defendants took judges out to drink, they set out directly from the courthouse. If they spotted Dong Xianfa pacing in front of the gate around noontime, they felt obliged to call out:
“Come have lunch with us, Dong.”
At first, he’d hesitated.
“I’m busy.” But then, before they could respond: “Did I say busy? Hell, it can wait till this afternoon.” And, “The ducks can wait till the afternoon to go down to the river.”
And off he’d go to lunch with the others.
But after a while, when they spotted him, they anticipated his response:
“We know how busy you are, Dong, so we won’t ask you to lunch today.”
“I never said I was busy,” Dong said unhappily. “What’s that all about? You plan to eat by yourselves? Don’t underestimate me,” he added. “I’m telling you, I’ve worked in the courthouse for twenty years. I may not be able to help you when you need it, but I can still make things hard for you.”
That would embarrass them.
“Look at you,” they’d say. “Can’t you take a joke?”
Off they’d go together.
Then, in time they began sneaking out the back door, knowing that a fellow by the name of Dong Xianfa was waiting for them out front.
He was pacing in front of the courthouse when Li Xuelian saw him for the first time. She’d never stepped foot in a courthouse before bringing legal action against Qin Yuhe, and so did not know who Dong Xianfa was. But she’d refused to accept the decision handed down by Wang Gongdao, whom she now found untrustworthy, and could not wait to try again. This time, rather than simply sue to have last year’s divorce from Qin Yuhe overturned, she’d first sue to overturn Wang’s decision. That was the way to start over. Not going to court was one thing; taking a case to court complicated things. The problem was, she didn’t know how to have Wang’s decision overturned; what she did know, however, was that she’d have to find someone who had authority over him. Since Wang was a judge in the county’s Number One Civil Court, she went looking for his boss, a man named Jia, who saw at once that this was going to be a tricky issue, brought to court by a hard-to-manage complainant. Worst of all, he could see that the woman had no knowledge of how the law worked, and that trying to explain things to her would be harder than actually sorting out the case. Jia worried that the more he explained things, the more complicated the matter could get, to the point where he himself might be implicated.
Li Xuelin went to see Jia at six in the evening, as he was getting ready to go out to dinner. An inspiration came to him in his eagerness to start the eating and drinking, a way to untangle a thorny problem. He’d shunt the case over to Dong Xianfa of the Judicial Committee. He had no gripe with Dong, but he knew he could not possibly pass this on to another senior official, such as one of the deputy chiefs, and definitely not to the chief justice himself. Besides, he’d always enjoyed his verbal jousts with Dong. When the two men met, the only thing that counted as a greeting was a personal barb. Just the night before, Jia had jousted with Dong over drinks at a banquet, and he was ripe to keep the joust alive.
“This is a thorny case,” he said as he sucked air in between his teeth.
“It didn’t start out like that,” Li Xuelian said. “It got that way because of you people.”
“The case has already been decided, it’s a court ruling. I’m not high enough to overturn one of those.”
“Who is high enough?”
“I’ll give you a name,” he said after a thoughtful pause, “but you can’t tell him where you got it.”
“Why the hush-hush?”
“He’s had to deal with so many thorny cases I’m afraid one more might send him over the edge.”
“Who is it?”
“A standing member of the court’s Judicial Committee, Dong Xianfa.”
“What does one of those do?”
“In a hospital he’d be a specialist who worked only on rare diseases.”
Was Jia correct to say that? Yes, he was. From a theoretical perspective, Dong Xianfa was a judicial expert who, by definition, specialized in thorny cases. In terms of hierarchy, a judicial expert outranked a presiding judge, which made him Jia’s superior. But everyone associated with the court knew that the term “expert” was ornamental, and that Dong had less authority than those below him.
On Jia’s recommendation, Li Xuelian went to the courthouse, arriving at half past noon the next day, where she encountered Dong Xianfa, who had been pacing in front of the gate for more than an hour. She knew only that Dong was a judicial expert who specialized in important and thorny cases. Dong had no idea who she was. Since they were total strangers, she respectfully refrained from interrupting him as he looked up and down the street, over and over, until it was obvious that he hadn’t seen what he was looking for in the half hour she’d watched him.
“Are you judicial expert Dong?” she finally approached and said.
The interruption caught him by surprise. He looked at his wristwatch and saw that it was already one o’clock, which meant he’d have no company for lunch that day. He turned.
“Who are you?” he said.
“My name is Li Xuelian.”
That rang no bell. He yawned.
“What do you want?”
“You people misjudged my case.”
The fog in Dong Xianfa’s brain was too thick for him to recall if he’d intervened in such a case. If he had, he wouldn’t have been able to recall anyway.
“The court hears many cases. Which one are you talking about?”
So Li Xuelian told him about her case, starting from the beginning; Dong had heard enough before she was halfway through, especially since all that divorcing and remarrying and re-divorcing, past, present, and future, was so complicated he knew he had never intervened in it, and so complicated he didn’t want to hear more. Livestock talk was a lot more interesting than this stuff.
“This case of yours,” he cut her off impatiently, “is none of my business.”
“None of yours, maybe,” Xuelian, “but plenty of Wang Gongdao’s.”
“Then it’s Wang Gongdao you need to talk to, not me.”
“You’re his superior, and since he misjudged my case, you’re who I have to see.”
“There are lots of people in court above Wang Gongdao. Why not them?”
“Because they told me you’re an expert in difficult cases.”
That’s when it hit Dong that someone at court was having fun at his expense, dumping someone else’s problem on him.
“Which son of a bitch told you than?” he spat out angrily. “Misjudging a case is exactly what you can expect from bad people who don’t belong in a court of law. Go talk to whoever sent you to me. And after you do that, I’ll look him up.”
He turned to storm off, his mind set on a couple of drinks and a bowl of lamb noodles to take care of his hunger, since the others had gone to lunch without him. Li Xuelian reached out and stopped him.
“You can’t leave, specialist Dong. You have to settle this for me.”
Dong didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. “Why me? The court has plenty of people.”
“I did you a favor already.”
“What did you do?”
“I took a bundle of cotton and two hens to your house this morning.”
Now he really didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.
“Do you honestly expect to gain a hold on me with a bundle of cotton and a couple of
chickens? Go get them out of my house.”
He pulled his sleeve free and started off again, only to be stopped a second time.
“Your wife promised me you’d look into my case.”
“She’s good at feeding pigs, and that’s about all. She knows nothing about the law.”
“According to you, then, I’ve done all that for nothing.”
“Not for nothing,” he said, pointing a finger at her. “What you’ve done is called bribery. Do you know what that means? You’re holding me responsible for something I didn’t do.”
For the third time Li Xuelian delayed his departure, and by now a crowd had formed. Dong Xianfa, who was already stewing in anger, lost his temper at the sight of the crowd.
“You’re nothing but a troublemaker. How dare you grab my sleeve in public! Get out of here!”
He shoved her away and walked off.
That night, Dong Xianfa rode his bike back to Dong Family Village, some five li from town. He could smell stewed chicken before he walked in the door. Once inside, he saw that his father-in-law was visiting and that his wife was stewing chickens. He’d put the Li Xuelian affair out of his mind, but it popped right back in as he walked into the kitchen and lifted the lid off the pot in which two stewed chickens, cut into eight pieces, were nearly ready to eat.
“When will you ever learn?” he screamed at his wife. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing? You’re accepting bribery and breaking the law!”
By the following morning he’d forgotten all about it.
7
Li Xuelian spotted Chief Justice Xun Zhengyi—Impartial Xun—in front of the Pine and Crane Hotel. Justice Xun, who was so drunk he had to be carried downstairs, had held the position for three years, and, at only thirty-eight, was younger than all his peers in neighboring counties. Being young meant he had to think about the future of what was expected to be a long career, which was why he was socially cautious. He seldom drank, having devised five career rules for himself: no drinking alone; no drinking during work hours; no drinking in legal circles; no drinking in the home county; and no drinking Monday through Friday. Overlaps and redundancies were, of course, unavoidable, but they added up to a single phrase: he did not drink without a reason.