I Did Not Kill My Husband

by Liu Zhenyun

  “If you can bark three times like a dog, you can have what’s left in this bowl,” the man said.

  “Arf arf arf,” Ma barked three times, and the man pushed the bowl over to him. He licked it clean. Everyone around the table laughed, including Li Xuelian. Then they turned their attention to the flatbreads and bowls of stew in front of them, crunching and slurping until their faces were sweaty, and the mood congenial. There was more Ma Wenbin wanted to say. As a gullible little boy who couldn’t tell a lie, he said, he was easily and often taken advantage of by a kid brother who was much cleverer than he was. If this brother stole something to eat at home, he got the blame and suffered the beating, since his brother could outtalk him any day of the week. He was even blamed once for a lost goat. What bothered him the most was, he always told the truth and was punished for lying, while his brother was always lying, and everyone still believe him. By this time, Li Xuelian was drawn into the conversation, given the tone and the topic.

  “That’s precisely why I’m protesting,” she blurted out. “How could something so patently false be considered true? And why does no one believe me when I’m telling the truth?”

  Now that she had broached the subject, it was time for Ma to confront the matter at hand, but in a roundabout manner. He began by criticizing County Chief Zheng Zhong and Chief Justice Wang Gongdao. That was why they were there. He had censured them for their simplistic approach to work, for placing themselves in opposition to the masses. Forgetting that they are public servants, they acted like officious bureaucrats. An even greater mistake was always assuming that the masses were lying, rather than putting themselves in the people’s shoes. Here you had someone who had been lodging the same protest for twenty years, sacrificing her youth to principle. Would she have persisted until her hair turned gray if there was nothing to her claim of injustice? Would you two have been capable of doing what she did? Li Xuelian was moved by what she was hearing, as if for the first time she had found a true friend. Who said there were no decent cadres in the government? There’s one right here. Zheng and Wang, their faces red from the verbal thrashing, nodded over and over.

  “I’ll write a self-criticism when I’m back home,” they promised.

  Li Xuelian felt as if the criticism had been too harsh.

  “It’s not all their fault,” she said to Ma. “As officials, this hasn’t been easy for them.”

  “You see,” Ma said as he smacked the tabletop with the palm of his hand, “a countrywoman has greater awareness than either of you two.”

  More head nodding by Zheng and Wang.

  “Greater than ours, much greater.”

  Ma Wenbin smiled and forged ahead:

  “Let me ask you something, dear Sister-in-law. Don’t answer me if you don’t feel like it. They didn’t believe you when you said you weren’t interested in protesting this time, and forced you into saying something extreme. Can you repeat what you said? Or can we take back what we said?”

  He added:

  “I won’t force you if you’d rather not.”

  Once again, Li Xuelian was moved by what Ma Wenbin was saying.

  “I can when you say it like that, Mayor. I can repeat myself.”

  She pointed to Zheng Zhong and Wang Gongdao.

  “I told them twice I wasn’t going to protest this year, but they refused to believe me.”

  Ma Wenbin also pointed to Zheng Zhong and Wang Gongdao.

  “Just like I told the truth when I was a kid and powerful people wouldn’t believe me.”

  Everyone laughed.

  “We’re only talking now, dear Sister-in-law, so let me ask another question. Why would you decide to stop protesting after twenty years?”

  That was the same question Zheng Zhong and Wang Gongdao had asked on two separate occasions. She supplied the same answer as before:

  “Because I finally saw the light.”

  Ma laughed. “Why this year and not before? Did something happen to change your mind? I want to remind you that you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

  It was a question Wang and Zheng had overlooked both times. They had been so focused on finding out the “what” that they’d neglected to investigate the “why.” Of course they wouldn’t believe her. But Ma knew that a physician doesn’t dispense medicine without asking about symptoms, which is what he was doing. The other two were no match for him. This is where the “small” came in, and was why the mayor was a cut above. They nodded out of admiration.

  “No,” Li replied, “nothing happened. I just listened to what my cow said.”

  That was the last thing any of them expected to hear and they did not know how to deal with this strange and sudden turn of events. Even Ma Wenbin was so bewildered he stammered his reaction:

  “C … cow? What cow is that?”

  Zheng Zhong regained his composure in time to ask:

  “How does a cow come into a conversation about people?”

  “For twenty years, not a single person has believed me, but my cow did. And that’s why I made up my mind. In the past, every time I asked my cow if I should protest, it said ‘Yes,’ so I did. But this year, my cow would not go along with it, so I decided not to protest.”

  The question they all wanted to ask stumbled out of the bewildered secretary’s mouth:

  “Is this a real cow you’re talking about, or are you teasing us?”

  “I’m not teasing anybody. It’s a cow I raised myself.”

  Ma Wenbin had recaptured his presence of mind.

  “Can I see this cow?” he asked her. “Will it speak to me?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It died a few days ago.”

  The men did not know whether to laugh or cry.

  “Sister-in-law, Mayor Ma has traveled quite a distance to meet with you,” Zheng Zhong said indignantly, “and with the best of intentions. You should not be playing games with him when he’s trying to help you resolve your problem. That is a sign of disrespect.”

  Zheng’s indignation fueled her anger.

  “You see,” she said as she smacked her palms together, “this is what’s been happening all along. I try to tell the truth and nobody believes me.”

  Ma stopped Zheng from saying more and, with a smile, said to Xuelian:

  “I believe you, Sister-in-law, I’m sure the cow is real.”

  Then he said:

  “Let’s all take the cow’s advice and have no protest this year, how’s that?”

  “There’s a difference,” Xuelian said.

  “What difference,” Ma asked.

  “The difference is, I’d listen to what the cow said but not to what you say.”

  “How’s that?” Ma was confused.

  “My cow said not to protest because it was a waste of time. You want me not to protest and let the injustice stand. Those are two different things.”

  “Sister-in-law,” an utterly confused Ma said, “didn’t we come to help you resolve your problem?”

  Li Xuelian was now in tears.

  “Don’t try to trick me,” she said. “If you thought I was being unjustly treated, there’d have been no need for you to come see me. All you had to do is right the wrong.”

  She pointed a finger at Zheng Zhong and Wang Gongdao.

  “You’re all the same. You came here to confuse me so I won’t go to Beijing to protest and cost you your jobs.

  “If you’re so interested in helping me,” she continued, “how come you’ve only come to see me just before the National People’s Congress meets? And one after the other. Your plan is to deceive me for a few days, then go away and forget about me.”

  Ma Wenbin frowned. He now knew that Li Xuelian was a force to be reckoned with. He’d come to see her in order to resolve a problem, never dreaming that she would show such disrespect—a talking cow! As both sides vied to outwit the other, he had fallen into her trap. Had he known this could happen, he’d never have asked what had changed her mind, and th
ere’d have been no mention of a cow. And yet, how could he dispense medicine without asking about the symptoms? To be sure, Ma Wenbin wasn’t frightened off by falling into her talking cow trap, since he’d come expressly to see where things stood. Now, with the arrival of the cow, he saw that there was nothing he could do. She said she wasn’t going to protest, but she was. Either that, or she was having fun at their expense. Zheng and Wang’s view of the situation had been proven right. And yet Ma wasn’t frightened off by knowing there was nothing he could do either. In dealing with cadres under his supervision who screwed up, he first determined if there was something he could do about it. If there was, he called the person in for a talk. If not, there was no need for that.

  Seeing the frown on Ma’s face, his secretary got up and announced:

  “That’ll do it for today’s conversation. Mayor Ma has business in the city.”

  Ma stood up, a broad smile on his face, and said:

  “Sister-in-law, I have to leave to take care of some business. You do as you see fit.”

  He left the diner, his secretary and County Chief Zheng hard on his heels, leaving Chief Justice Wang to pick up the pieces. His hand shook as he said:

  “Just what were you doing, Cousin? Instead of talking about your case, you brought your cow into the discussion. Why abuse people like that?”

  “I didn’t abuse anybody,” Xuelian said as she dried her tears.

  “Comparing somebody to an animal isn’t abuse?”

  He walked in circles, his hand trembling.

  “You’ll listen to an animal before you’ll listen to what the government has to say, which means none of the officials, all the way up, aren’t even the equal of a farm animal.”

  “No matter what I say,” Xuelian said, getting angry, “none of you will believe me. You only think the worst of me.”

  She paused.

  “Since that’s how it is, I’ve decided to protest again this year.”

  Wang Gongdao clapped his hands.

  “Well, now, you’ve finally told the truth.”

  4

  Li Xuelian’s large compound included a three-room house with a tile roof to the north, a kitchen to the east, and two cow pens to the west. The house had been built twenty-two years earlier, when she and Qin Yuhe had been married six years and their son was five. She raised cows and three old sows to make it possible to knock down a thatched cottage and build their three-room house. Half of the money for wood and bricks came from the sale of calves and piglets; the other half came from her husband’s overtime earnings as a truck driver for the fertilizer plant, nighttime work that left him bleary-eyed. He regularly dozed off at the wheel late at night, and one night ran into a roadside scholar tree. Repairs to the truck cost two thousand yuan, so he had to start over. He and Xuelian argued a lot, but never enough to cause a rupture in their marriage. But then, a year after the house was completed, Qin Yuhe changed, and Xuelian began to regret her decision to talk to him about a sham divorce when she discovered she was pregnant again. They spent as much time apart as they did together, and what began as a sham became a reality. Arguments gave way to court proceedings, which continued for twenty years, until their hair had nearly turned white, and still no resolution in sight. What she regretted most was that the sham divorce had been her lousy brainstorm, and had been for the benefit of the daughter she would give birth to, and with whom she would later have an unexpected falling out.

  Twenty-two years of being buffeted by wind and rain had taken their toll on the house. The northern wall had collapsed under the onslaught of summer and autumn rains, bricks on the other three sides had fallen off and crumbled into dust at an alarming rate. Large sections of the interior wall plaster were disintegrating, and the roof had sprung leaks ten years before. Anyone else during those twenty years of protest would not have cared about house repairs. For the first ten years, she too had neglected house repairs and housekeeping, and the place had turned into a sty. She’d also neglected her own appearance, seldom changing out of dirty clothes and letting her hair start to look like a rat’s nest. Out on the street, from a distance she looked like a beggar, or the apt picture of a protester. After ten years, her protests had become routine, and she’d gotten used to it. She’d gotten used not to all the annual travel, but to when it was disrupted on the rare occasion when she was ill and confined to her bed at home. When she could not carry out her protest, she did not know what to do with herself. It had evolved into such a habitual event that it became the essence of her daily life, and that was the stimulus for her to start taking care of herself and her house. She cut her hair short, washed her clothes on schedule, and would not go out to protest unless she was presentable. Repairing walls, inside and out, was too big a job, but she had to deal with her leaky roof, so she hired someone to replace the old tiles and seal the gaps with lime that effectively kept the rain out. She swept up the flakes that had peeled from the walls in the house, which spruced the place up considerably, even though the walls had a mottled appearance. She made sure the rooms were neat and tidy, lining the base of compound walls with scarlet sage and cockscomb. Anyone coming inside would not think this was the house of a perennial petitioner.

  The three rooms were divided by partitions. The one on the left served as a pantry and storeroom; the center room was essentially a hallway, and the room to the right was their bedroom. Twenty-one years before it had been the room in which Li Xuelian and Qin Yuhe slept together; now she slept there alone. A student’s math booklet hung on the wall beside the bedroom window; it was where she recorded her twenty-year protest history. Time had not been kind to the notebook, which was falling apart and as dirty as an old rag. But an old rag that recorded the locations of all her protests and whom she’d met at each one. As her hair turned from jet black to gray and her once slender waist thickened, she hoped that her booklet would one day help her make the false false and the true true. But after twenty years, the false was still true and the true remained false. At the same time, she had not been able to shed the title of Pan Jinlian. Ten years earlier, this had nearly driven her mad. But as one year led into the next, she’d gotten used to it, just as she’d gotten used to carrying out her protests.

  Everyone at the provincial, municipal, and county levels knew she did that every year, but what was remembered was the protest, not the frequency. Even she could not recall all the details of her protest history. It was all there in her notebook. In addition to the recorded details, it included a tally, according to which she had gone to Beijing to protest at the National People’s Congress nineteen times in twenty years and had been stopped by local police eleven of those times. She had been detained three times by the Hebei police before she even reached Beijing, and on five trips, she had been visited in her hotel room by county police, who had “advised” her to return home three of those times. She’d been arrested by Beijing police on the two other trips, once on Chang’an Street and once in Tiananmen Square. What it added up to was that not once in twenty years had her protest been successful, and not once, after the first time, had she managed to make it as far as the Great Hall of the People. Reason enough for her to keep at it. What puzzled her was why people at all government levels—province, municipality, county—remained apprehensive of her after twenty years of failed protests. It had gotten so bad that she was called “Cousin” by the chief justice and “Aunt” by the township head. Maybe she hadn’t considered the possibility that her failures had put everyone even more on guard against the possibility of one success.

  But no protest this year, not because anything had been resolved or because she had been frightened off by the officials or even because she had lost heart after so many failures, but because the one person who actually believed her had died. And that person wasn’t a person at all, it was her cow. Twenty-one years earlier, Xuelian and her husband had discussed a sham divorce in the cowshed, whose only other occupants were a cow and her nursing calf. No one else in the world overheard the conve
rsation. That worked to Qin Yuhe’s advantage, for six months later he took up with another woman, telling people that the divorce was real and making it possible to marry the other woman. It was also the reason nothing had come of Li Xuelian’s protests after twenty years. That had nearly driven her mad ten years before, when she’d carried on until people on the street thought she was mentally disturbed. Her ten-year-old daughter felt the same way, and wouldn’t sleep in the same bed with her, preferring to stay at a neighbor’s house. Xuelian herself thought that something must be wrong with her, greeting people with broad smiles during the day and running off to the cowshed at night to try to teach her cow to speak, hoping that one day it would help her get justice. But a cow speak? Really now! Then one day the cow died, leaving its daughter behind, an eleven-year-old calf, one year older than Xuelian’s daughter. Ten years had passed since the calf had arrived with its mother, and it was now a middle-aged cow. It had cried when its mother died, earning a kick from Li Xuelian.

  “You cry when your mother dies, but not for me and my ten years of fruitless protest”

  The cow looked into Xuelian’s face.

  “I know you can’t talk, but you ought to be able to nod and shake your head, can’t you? You were there when we talked about divorcing eleven years ago, so tell me, was it real or was it a sham?”

  Imagine her surprise when the cow shook its head. Li Xuelian threw her arms around its neck and wailed:

  “My darling little one, finally, someone who believes me!”

  Hearing Xuelian’s tearful howl, her neighbor assumed it was a moment of madness, and ran over, thinking she was crying over the death of her cow. Once the neighbor had left, Xuelian said to the cow:

  “Tell me, should I or shouldn’t I keep protesting?”