by Liu Zhenyun
“Big Head,” Xuelian said tearfully, “that was rape, and don’t you forget it.”
Zhao dried her tears and patted her on the thigh.
“We wasted thirty good years,” he said. Then he lowered his voice. “Well, how was it?”
“In the middle of the day,” she said, embarrassed. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”
Then she laid her head on his chest and whispered:
“That was the first time in my life.”
This most intimate of events altered both the direction and the destination of their trek. Big Head covered them both with the quilt, exposing only their heads, and held her hand.
“Let me ask you something, my love. Do people prefer to be with those they like or those they have nothing to do with?”
“That’s a dumb question,” Xuelian answered. “That’s obvious.”
“Do people prefer to be with loved ones or with enemies?”
“That’s another dumb question.”
“Okay, saying that I ask dumb questions just proves how dumb you are.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Since you know the difference between loved ones and enemies, I think you ought to forget about your protest. Protesting takes you away from loved ones and into the arms of enemies. If you succeed in bringing down your enemies, then the protest has been worth it. But it’s been twenty years, and you have nothing to show for it. And there’s no guarantee that this year will be any different. You’ll be the same as always, and so will your enemies.”
“I’ve finally come around to your way of thinking,” Xuelian admitted. “I didn’t want to protest at first, just as the cow said, but those rotten officials backed me into a corner and forced me to change my mind. When they turned everything I said against me, they became my target instead of Qin Yuhe.”
“You don’t have to tell me how bad they are,” Big Head said. “But just because they’re worse than Qin Yuhe, tormenting them will take even more out of you, and still you’ll come away with nothing.”
Xuelian sat up with a bounce.
“But I’ve got all this anger inside me.”
“That’s precisely what I’m talking about,” he said with a clap of his hands. “It’s that anger that has caught you up in this struggle for twenty years, and you and I aren’t getting any younger. There’s nothing wrong with fighting them except that it stands in the way of our future.”
He touched her down below. She lay back.
“There’s a saying,” he said, “that you have to step back to see the vastness of the ocean and the sky. You are one person against many levels of officialdom. You are fighting with your bare hands, but they have the power to call in the police anytime they want. We’re running away from them, aren’t we? That’s because we can’t beat them. The issue isn’t whether or not you’ll eventually come out of this with something, but that you’ve been throwing your life away, one year at a time. How long do you want to keep jumping into this mud hole? Why don’t we rescue ourselves and enjoy a happy life?”
“Tell me,” he whispered, “was that fun or wasn’t it?
They were having this talk only because of what they’d just done. In the past, she had refused to listen. Now things were different. What he said now made sense, and if she put her happiness aside to keep battling corrupt officials, she was indeed doing what he said. At the age of twenty-nine, she’d had plenty of time, but at forty-nine, there wasn’t that much life left to throw away. He was right when he said there was no one she could ask for help, that she’d have to save herself. But maybe, just maybe, she was saved today by what he said. Quietly, her eyes filled with tears, tears of bitterness for wasting twenty years of her life. He dried her tears for her.
“If you want to put an end to this, you and I can go back and get married. Then we won’t have to deal with people like that or any other enemies ever again. If they know you’ve decided to stop tormenting them, they’ll forget about getting the police drunk—they know their priorities.”
Xuelian sat up again.
“Even if I follow your advice to stop protesting, I can’t go back just yet.”
“Why?”
“I have to stick it to them one last time. If we head back home now, they’ll know I’ve stopped protesting. But if we don’t, they’ll think we’re on our way to Beijing, and that scares them. If I’m in Beijing, that’s where they’ll look for me. Except this year there’ll be no protest. I want them to try to find me in Beijing.”
“You’re right,” Big Head agreed, “you’re absolutely right. Stick it to them one more time. They’ll never find us in Beijing, and they’ll be frantic.”
He paused.
“But we can’t stay here,” he continued. “Not far enough from the county. They’ll likely find us if we don’t leave.”
“Where should we go?” she asked, a note of concern creeping in.
“I’ll take you to Mt. Tai. You’ve never been there, have you?”
“All I’ve done for the past twenty years is protest, and Beijing is the only place I’ve been to.”
“Mt. Tai is a beautiful spot. We’ll watch the sunrise together. It’s a sight that’ll open up your heart.”
They had begun seeing things the same way. Zhao rolled over, laid Xuelian across the bed, and mounted her. She tried to push him away.
“Again? she said. “Are we ready?”
He took her hand and moved it down below. “You tell me.”
He returned to the harbor, and as he moved he said:
“Here with you, I’m like a youngster again.”
The following morning, they left their bicycle at the inn and took a bus to Mt. Tai. The highway was under construction, though still open to traffic, and was stop-and-go all the way to the town of Tai’an, which they didn’t reach until 5:30 in the afternoon, too late for mountain climbing that day. So they found an out-of-the-way inn down a small lane and checked in for the night. Big Head was in no mood to rest that night either. In the morning, after a quick breakfast by the gate, they went climbing. To save money, they climbed a serpentine path up the mountain instead of riding to the top in a cable car. They were surrounded by a cacophony of accents. Xuelian was in such high spirits on this, her very first sightseeing trip, that she struck up a conversation with just about every woman she met on the way. For Big Head, on the other hand, two nights of heavy activity had taken its toll, and he had to stop at every stage to catch his breath; he lacked the energy to talk to anyone, including Xuelian, who giggled when she saw him gasping for breath, and tapped him on the forehead.
“A bad boy at night. Let’s see how bad you can be now.”
He stiffened his neck defiantly.
“It’s not what we did at night, it’s my arthritic knees.”
Most people can reach the peak of Mt. Tai before noon. But, slowed down by Big Head’s snail’s pace, at noon they had only made it halfway, to Mid Sky Gate, where the western and eastern paths converged. He sat down in front of a little temple around the bend and mopped his brow.
“Why don’t you go on alone?” he said. “I’ll wait for you here.”
“How much fun can it be for one person to go alone on an outing for two?” she said, her disappointment showing.
But it was clear he could not keep climbing, so there was no use pushing the issue.
“Then we’ll just rest here,” she said, “and head back down in a while.”
“I said we were going to the top today,” he said, feeling pangs of regret. “If we don’t we’ll miss the chance to see the sunrise in the morning.”
“At home,” Xuelian said to make him feel better, “I’m out in the field before dawn every day, so I never miss a sunrise.”
“It’s different on Mt. Tai.”
“Isn’t it the same sun?”
They ate their lunch of bread and tea-steeped eggs, and washed it down with bottled water they’d brought along, then started back down the mountain. The easy trip dow
n breathed life into Big Head.
“We’ll come back next year,” he said. “This shortened climb doesn’t count.”
“I’ve seen the mountain,” Xuelian said, “so why spend the money to return? We’ll go somewhere else.”
At the foot of the mountain they had a lunch of flatbreads and noodles with marinated mutton at a roadside stand, and then returned to the inn to rest. Zhao was on his best behavior at night, lying beside Xuelian as they talked about their schooldays thirty years before. She asked him when he first became interested in her.
“You have to ask? It was the first time I laid eyes on you.”
Xuelian puffed in disbelief.
“We were in middle school. I was thirteen.”
Then:
“You ignored me all through middle school.”
Zhao had to admit that he didn’t have real feelings for her until high school.
“You were just a kid in middle school. You blossomed in high school.”
She next asked him where he’d gotten the money to buy the “Big White Rabbit” candy he’d given her.
“Filched it from my father,” he said. “That candy cost me plenty of whippings.”
Xuelian laughed. Wrapping her arms around him, she planted a kiss on the top of his head. She then brought up the incident in high school where he’d called her out to the threshing ground and wondered why he’d run off when she pushed him away.
He slapped the side of the bed.
“I was a coward back then,” he said, displaying feelings of regret. “If I’d had any guts, I could have changed the course of a couple of lives.”
He shook his head.
“It’s taken me thirty years to find some courage.”
“So now you’ve got courage?” Xuelian puffed a second time. “More like no shame!”
They laughed. Their talk then turned to their classmates and teachers. By now most of their teachers had passed on, and they had trouble recalling some of their middle school classmates. Five of their high school classmates had died, the rest had dispersed to all corners, and most were likely grandparents, after thirty years. Few had done especially well in life; the majority had been dragged into a life of exhaustion from raising children. With the mention of children, Xuelian told him that she’d raised her daughter as a single mom, only to be betrayed by someone with whom she could never see eye to eye. The girl wasn’t disobedient though; it was all because of Xuelian’s protests. Other people, ignorant of the details behind what she was doing, could be excused for pointing at her behind her back, but her own daughter, who had spent all those years by her side and knew the whole story, not only lacked understanding, but complained of being embarrassed by the way her mother had lodged public protests all those years. That incensed Xuelian. Her daughter, who had married at nineteen to get away, seldom came to see her. Her son, on the other hand, who had grown up in Qin Yuhe’s home, was affectionate toward his mother, who had given him the name Youcai, in hopes of investing him with “talent.” The previous autumn, they had passed one another on the street. He was in his thirties with a son at home, and Xuelian hadn’t recognized him at first, not having seen him in years. But he had stopped abruptly, turned and caught up with her. “Ma,” he’d called out.
“You’ve gotten old, Ma,” he’d said as Mother and son stood there looking at one another for a moment. “I know you’ve suffered tremendous injustice, but you have to take care of yourself.”
When they said good-bye, Youcai had slipped her two hundred yuan. At this point in her account she teared up.
“Youcai was right,” Big Head said as he dried her tears.
He sighed, as thoughts of his own son surfaced. Since the boy wasn’t much of a student, Big Head had taken him into the kitchen to learn the trade. But that hadn’t lasted long, since the youngster could not stay put. Now, some thirty years later, the best he could manage was a part-time job in the county Bureau of Animal Husbandry and spent the rest of his time with his no-account friends. Since he never earned enough to support his wife and child, he regularly borrowed money from Big Head, who did not earn enough at the restaurant to help out his son as well, and was fortunate to have a pension that helped him make ends meet.
“Our children have turned out to be the bane of our existence,” he said emotionally. “I must have owed him something in a previous life.”
And so they slept. The next morning they took a walking tour of Tai’an city, not stopping to buy anything, since the nice things were too expensive and the affordable things served no purpose. They returned to the inn at noon, where Big Head suggested they travel to Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius, little more than a hundred li away. No mountains to climb there. They’d studied the wise sayings of Confucius in middle school, but had never encountered the man himself.
“Why not?” Xuelian said, feeling they ought to go some place, since they needed to stay away from home. “But for the city’s famous sesame candy, not for Confucius. I’d like to try some of that.”
“Good point. Let’s see which is better, the sesame candy Confucius ate or the Big White Rabbit candy I gave you when we were kids.”
They decided to travel to Qufu that afternoon to enjoy some of its sesame candy. Big Head went to buy bus tickets, leaving Xuelian at the inn to pack their things. That done, she went out to buy Big Head a sweater. Though spring was in the air, there was a chill in the morning and evening. She’d brought a sweater along when she left the house, but Big Head had been so busy tricking the police into getting drunk he’d left wearing only a thin jacket. Xuelian noticed that he’d left the hotel that morning shivering from the cold and sneezing. She’d wanted to buy him a sweater on their tour of the city, had even spotted one at a mall for ninety-six yuan. But he wouldn’t let her spend that much on him. Now, as they were getting ready to travel, she was worried he might fall ill in the cold air, and the medicine to fight a cold would cost more than a sweater. So she walked the two li to the mall they’d passed that morning and managed to knock the price down to eighty-five. On her way back she bought some rolls and pickled mustard root to eat on the road. She heard Big Head’s voice outside the room, which meant he’d already bought the tickets. But who was he talking to? She listened a bit more and could tell that he was on his cell phone, but before she opened the door and walked in, she heard that he was arguing with whoever was on the other end. She waited in the doorway.
“I haven’t been calling you. I’ve taken care of my end. Have you done what I asked you to do?”
She couldn’t hear what the other party said.
“All you care about is reporting to the county government how I’ve taken care of Li Xuelian. How about my son’s job?”
Again, what the other party said was lost.
“I trust the government, but I want to see for myself.”
Another inaudible pause.
“What the hell does that mean? There’s no comparing the two things. How am I supposed to let you see for yourself? Forget about Shandong, even back in the county, you can’t stand by the bed when I’m doing it with her.”
Silence, then:
“Of course it’s all wrapped up. We’re going to be married when we get back, and lodging a protest will be the furthest thing from her mind.”
Li Xuelian felt like a bomb had gone off in her head.
9
Jia Congming was a standing member of the County Judicial Committee, a position held twenty years earlier by a man named Dong Xianfa. Li Xuelian had gone to Dong twenty years earlier to lodge a protest, which he said was out of his jurisdiction. An argument had ensued, at the end of which he’d called her a troublemaker and told her to get lost. Eventually, she’d crashed the NPC in Beijing and he, along with the chief justice, county chief, and the city’s mayor, had all been sacked. Dong had retired to the marketplace, where he’d sold livestock until suffering a stroke and dying a few years later, thus fading into history.
Jia Congming, a man in his forties, had bee
n in the position for three years. Six months earlier, a deputy chief justice had retired, and Jia had hopes of filling the vacancy. Promotion to deputy chief justice was not a dizzying advancement for a standing member of the Judicial Committee; on paper he outranked a judge, but no power was attached to the position, which made it a less desirable post. The legal establishment included Criminal Court #1, Criminal Court #2, Civil Court #1, Civil Court #2, Commerce Court, Juvenile Court, Executive Court, altogether a dozen or so branches, each of which had a section chief. Beyond that were the townships, each of which had its own court of law. Added together, there were more than thirty section chiefs in the legal establishment, all of whom had the same idea Jia Congming had, which was to become a deputy chief justice. Few of his competitors considered the powerless standing committee member a viable rival. They vied over the prized bone for a full six months, which evaded them all, upsetting them but not Chief Justice Wang Gongdao. It was like three dozen monkeys fighting over a single grape; since only one would end up with it, they’d surround you so long as you held the grape in your hand. Once you let it drop into the mouth of one monkey, the others would quickly disperse. Even the one with the grape would turn its back on you as soon it ate it. People these days don’t take the long view, and they play politics like doing business, parting ways when the deal’s done. But if you hold on to the grape, the monkeys will not only surround you but you will reap a bigger harvest, in that they will offer you peaches every once in a while. That was how Wang Gongdao climbed the ladder to the position of chief justice; now he played the same game on these people. The deputy chief justices at the courthouse were quite happy with his strategy, since they also enjoyed some trickle-down benefits, like getting a few dates when Wang was given a peach. Dates were better than nothing. So the longer it dragged on, the more everyone benefitted from the vacancy, and not just Wang, but the county chiefs and their deputies as well. Some of the judges even tried working on the mayor.