by Yiyun Li
“Do you know who I saw today?” he asked.
“No.”
“Do you want to know?”
Nini hesitated and said yes.
“I saw the counterrevolutionary.”
Nini stopped. “Where is she?”
“Dead now.”
“Did you see her alive?”
“I wish I had. No, she was dead already,” Bashi said, and twisted Nini's left arm gently behind her back. “They bound her arms this way, so her middle finger was pointing at her heart. And bang,” he said, pushing his index finger into Nini's back.
Nini shuddered. She withdrew her arm, and hid her bad hand in her sleeve. “Where is she now?” she asked.
“Why?”
“I want to see her.”
“Everybody wants to see her. But believe me, there's nothing to see. She is as dead as a log. Heavier than a log, in fact. Do you know how I got to know this?”
“No.”
“Because I just helped this man move her body off the island. Oh, she's heavy, believe me.”
“Is she with the man?”
“He's digging a grave for her.”
“Where are they?”
“On the other side of the woods. It's quite a task to dig a hole now. They shouldn't really execute someone in this cold season. Summer would be much easier for everyone. I told the man not to waste his time. Old Hua and his wife would never dig a hole in the winter. But the man said he would take care of it and told me to go home first. Of course I didn't want to stay with the poor man and watch him work. Maybe we could go there tomorrow morning and see if he's got a hole the size of a bowl by then.”
“Can we go there now?”
“Why?”
“I want to see her.”
“But there's nothing to see. She's in a couple of sacks now.”
Nini looked upstream. The fire in their stove would be dead by the time she returned home. It would take her another fifteen minutes to start the fire, and dinner would be late. Her mother would knock her on the head with her hard knuckles. Bashi might change his mind and never give her the coal again. Still, she pushed away Bashi's hand and started to walk toward the woods.
“Hey, where are you going?”
“I want to see the body.”
“Don't leave me here. I'm going with you,” Bashi said, putting his hand back on Nini's shoulder. “The man who's burying her, you know, he is not easy to talk to, but he's a friend of mine. Ask him anything and he'll do it for you.”
“Why?” Nini asked.
“Silly, because you're my friend, no?”
THE WIND PICKED UP after sunset, and Bashi realized that he had left his hat on Nini's head. He chuckled when he thought about her serious little face. She rarely smiled, but her eyes, even the bad one with a droop, would become larger with attention when he was talking to her. He didn't know how much she understood of the rules between boys and girls, or how much she had heard about his reputation, but she had not said anything when he put a hand on her shoulder.
Before they parted, Bashi had asked Nini to come out again the next day, and she had neither agreed nor refused. The old bastard Kwen must have frightened her out of her poor soul, Bashi thought. He picked up a rock from the ground. It was suppertime now, the street deserted except for the leftover announcements, swept up and swirling about in the wind. Bashi looked around, and when he saw nobody in sight, he aimed the rock at the nearest streetlamp. It took him three tries to break the bulb.
Kwen had not behaved like a friend at all when Bashi and Nini had found him. It had taken them a while, and only when he saw a trail left by the body on the dead leaves did Bashi realize that Kwen had moved it farther, into another patch of woods. Kwen was half rolling, half carrying a big boulder toward the body, which was already partly covered by stones of different sizes. It was unrealistic of the parents to expect him to bury her underground in this weather, Kwen said when they approached him.
“As if I hadn't told you,” Bashi observed.
“Could you shut up just for once?” Kwen said.
That was not a way to speak to a friend, especially in front of his new companion, but Bashi tried not to protest. “If you're worried about wild dogs, you could cover the body with some heavy branches. Old Hua does that,” Bashi said. “You don't need to move all those stones.”
“I thought you were a smart man, and knew not to interfere with other people's business.”
“Just a friendly suggestion,” said Bashi.
Kwen looked at Bashi sharply. “I'd appreciate it if you'd leave me alone.”
“Don't worry. Your secret sits well with me,” said Bashi, running his finger along his mouth and making a zipping sound. He walked closer to Kwen. “But my friend there, she wants to have a look at the body.”
“Why?”
“Who doesn't want to see?”
Kwen shook his head and said it was not possible.
“Come on,” Bashi said, patting Kwen on the shoulder as he had seen men do to each other. “The girl only wants a quick look. It won't hurt anyone. I'll move the stones and I'll put them back. You can stand here and supervise us. It won't take more than a minute.”
Kwen brushed Bashi's hand away. Bashi made a face at Nini, hoping she would understand that brusqueness was normal between men. Wouldn't he want to help a friend to impress his girl? Bashi said in a low voice; she's just a girl to whom nobody paid any attention, and why not make her happy for a day Bashi whispered. Kwen shook his head, and when Bashi pressed again and insisted that he himself would open the sack for the girl, Kwen looked at Bashi with cold eyes. “You'd better leave before my patience runs out.”
“What's the matter with you?” Bashi said. “It's only a counter revolutionary's body, not your mother's.”
With a curse Kwen told Bashi to shut up. Bashi was shocked. He had thought that Kwen was fond of him; only an hour earlier Kwen had been the storyteller. Nini stared at them, and it hurt Bashi to see her unblinking eyes stay on his own face, hot and probably red as a beet now. “Fuck you,“ Bashi said to Kwen. “Fuck your sisters and your mother and your aunts and grandmas and all your dead female ancestors in their tombs.”
Before Bashi had time to react, Kwen held a long knife to his throat, the sharp blade pressed into his skin. In a cold voice Kwen told Bashi to get down on his knees.
For the next five minutes, Bashi did everything Kwen ordered him to do. He called himself all sorts of names, slapping his own face and begging for forgiveness. Kwen looked down at him with a smile. “You're a useless man, Bashi, do you know that?”
“Yes, of course,” Bashi said. It was then that Bashi noticed the suspicious stain on Kwen's crotch, near his fly, light gray on the dark corduroy overalls. Bashi moved closer, as if he wanted to let his head touch Kwen's feet, and stole another glance. Kwen could have given Bashi a thousand other explanations for the stain, but Bashi would never believe him.
It was dark when Bashi and Nini got back to town. She looked nervous, and did not reply when he suggested a meeting the next day. She was late, she said, and quickened her pace with a desperate effort; her parents might not be happy, he thought, but he decided not to ask her about the punishment she was to receive. He had enough to worry about, and would prefer not to take on her misery.
A block away, Bashi broke another bulb. He kicked the half bulb into the ditch. “You corpse rapist!” Heaven knows what else such a man could do, Bashi thought; the townspeople needed someone to watch out for them. He decided to go back and find out why Kwen had been so stubbornly guarding the body from them, but before that, he had to know Kwen's whereabouts. Think as a good detective, Bashi urged himself. He moved quietly toward Kwen's shack, and approached it facing the wind so the dog would not catch his scent. About sixty feet away, he hurled a rock in the direction of the shack. The black dog started to bark and jump at the invisible enemy. Bashi turned into a side alley quickly and heard Kwen shouting from inside the shack. After a few minutes, Kw
en came out of the shack and headed to the electric plant for his night shift. All safe for him to explore, Bashi thought. Who would have imagined that he, Bashi, the man whom everybody called an idiot, would be the one to work for the town's safety on this dark night? He rubbed his ears roughly with his hands; he wished he had not forgotten to retrieve his hat from Nini.
Stumbling in the darkness, Bashi had a hard time finding the spot. He made a mental note to buy some appropriate tools the next day, a good knife, a long and slim flashlight that he had seen a safety guard carry, a compact notebook and a pen of matching color, a pair of gloves, a magnifying glass, and some other things he imagined a detective needed. It was too late to make the purchase now, but at least the moonlight on the snow and a few weak stars made the search less difficult. Bashi fumbled in his pocket and found half a matchbook. He lit a match to make sure he was in the right place, and then started to work in the near darkness. The boulders were heavy, and he had to take a break from time to time. At least he had to give that bastard Kwen credit for being a strong man despite his age.
Bashi cleaned off all the boulders and then tried to untie the strings holding the sacks, but his fingers, too tired, could not finish the task. He bent down and broke the strings between his teeth. When he peeled the burlap sack away, his hand touched something hard and cold, not the ripped prisoner's uniform he had seen earlier but the woman's frozen body. Bashi gave a little startled cry, and then laughed at himself. “You'd better get used to this from now on,” he said in a hushed voice to himself.
The body, entirely uncovered now, looked eerie in the dim light. Kwen's old towel was still around the woman's head, and Bashi thought he'd better leave it there. “Sorry, miss, I don't mean to disturb you twice,” he said. “I'm just doing my job. For your good too.”
He lit another match and bent down to check the body, and it took him a long moment to register what he saw. His hand shook hard and the match dropped onto the snow, hissing for a moment before going out. Bashi sat down and panted, his legs too weak to support the weight of his knowledge. After a while, he lit another match and checked again. He was not mistaken: The woman's breasts were cut off, and her upper body, with the initial wound from the transplant operation and the massive cuts Kwen had made, was a mess of exposed flesh, dark red and gray and white. The same mess extended down to between her legs.
The match burned Bashi's finger and he flipped it away. He half squatted beside the body for a moment and started to gag. It had been a long day and he had nothing left to throw up. Still, he coughed and retched until his face was smeared with tears and bile dribbled down his chin. After a while, he calmed down and grabbed some snow to clean up his face. He wrapped the body up in the burlap sacks and tried to put back the boulders, but his arms and legs were shaking too hard. He spread dead tree branches and dry grass on top of the body, and when he felt sure the body was concealed well enough, he sat down and panted again, then cried.
The walk back home was exhausting. A few blocks away from his house, Bashi saw the dog, Ear, run by. He shouted at it and tried to muster his last energy to kick it. The dog yelped and ran away, dropping something by the roadside.
Bashi picked it up. It was a woman's shoe, the sole worn through with a hole. Bashi aimed it at a garbage can, but missed. “The world is becoming a hell of a place,” he said to no one in particular.
THE WIND HOWLED all evening, shaking windows, seizing loose tiles from roofs and hurling them across the empty yards and alleys. Kwen's black dog, tied to his post, whined and shivered, but his suffering meant little to the world, let alone to his master, who dozed off in the small cubelike janitor's shack, an empty flask on the floor next to his feet.
Elsewhere Mrs. Hua sipped from a chipped cup the rice liquor that her husband had poured for her earlier to numb the throbbing pain in her palm, and listened to the whistling of the wind through the woods. Old Hua and Mrs. Hua had sorted bottles and paper all afternoon and evening, and it was at the very end, when she was lost in her reverie, that she punched her palm with half of a broken bottle. There was not much bleeding, her aged body having little to offer now. Her husband washed it with saltwater and then poured a cup of rice liquor for her. They did not touch alcohol often, but a bottle had always been around, kept with the iodine and the rags they cleaned and boiled; it was the best medicine they could get, and once when Old Hua had had to remove gangrene from his leg by himself, he had downed half a bottle and later poured the other half onto the cut.
How was her hand? Old Hua asked, sitting down in his chair. Unless it was necessary they did not light the kerosene lamp, and she replied in the darkness that there was little to worry about. He nodded and did not talk for a while, and she felt the hard liquor slowly warming her body. Morning Glory, Mrs. Hua said, the name of their first daughter; did he want to talk about Morning Glory? The baby had been found on a summer dawn when morning glories, pink and blue and white and purple, had taken over the wilderness outside the mountain village where the Huas had passed through as beggars. The dew had soaked the rags that were bundling the little creature, her bluish gray face cold to the touch. For a moment Mrs. Hua thought it was another baby who had died before having ever enjoyed a day of her life, but her husband was the one to notice the small lips sucking.
Old Hua lit the tobacco pipe now and inhaled. The amber-colored tip flickered, the only light in the room. What's there to talk about? he asked, more out of resignation than rebuttal. Earlier that afternoon she had told Old Hua, while they were sorting, that it was time they began to tell themselves the stories of the seven daughters, before old age wiped out their memories. Neither Old Hua nor Mrs. Hua could read or write, and already Mrs. Hua had been frustrated when one girl's face was overlapped by another's in her dreams.
They could start with Morning Glory, Mrs. Hua said now, but she was momentarily confused. Where would they begin? When they had picked the bundle up from the grass, or when she had been sneaked out of the village before daybreak by her helpless mother? Mrs. Hua and her husband had looked for anything left by the parents—a name, a birthday, or a message they could later find people to read for them—but the rags that swaddled the baby, ripped from old sheets and worn-out undershirts, had said enough about the reason she had been discarded.
She was the prettiest, Old Hua said. He was as biased as a father could be, Mrs. Hua thought, but did not point it out to him. Morning Glory had been seventeen when Mr. and Mrs. Hua were forced to give up the girls. Seventeen was old enough for a girl to become a wife; still, when they found a family who was willing to take Morning Glory in as a child bride for one of their grown-up sons, they made the family swear to wait until Morning Glory turned eighteen before they would let the husband touch her. Mrs. Hua wondered aloud how well the other parents had kept their promises; they had had daughters themselves, she said, and as parents of girls they must have understood.
Old Hua nodded. He could have said that it made no difference now, and she was glad that he only smoked silently and listened.
“She liked to drink vinegar,” Mrs. Hua said.
Old Hua shook his head as if he did not trust her memory, but she knew she was not wrong about that. Once, when a younger girl had tipped over the vinegar bottle, Morning Glory had cried; she was seven or eight then, old enough not to shed tears over this, and Mrs. Hua remembered later catching the girl munching on clover stems for the tart juice and thinking that it must be one of those things that only her birth parents would have understood. Mrs. Hua wondered if Morning Glory would crave something odd in her pregnancies. Mrs. Hua had never been able to bear a baby herself, and she was always curious about the stories she heard of a pregnant woman's wants.
“How old is Morning Glory?” Mrs. Hua asked suddenly.
Old Hua thought for a moment and replied that she must be forty-one or forty-two now.
Mrs. Hua counted the years, but the liquor made it hard to keep the numbers straight. Middle-aged, she thought, with a litter of c
hildren of her own by now. Mrs. Hua wondered what Morning Glory would be like as a mother. She had been gentle with stray cats and wounded birds, and Mrs. Hua remembered her husband had once said that of the seven girls Morning Glory was the one to have the most of a Buddha's heart; a hard thing for a girl to live with, Mrs. Hua remembered herself replying then, but perhaps a full house of children to feed and many in-laws to please had long ago hardened that heart into a rock.
Night fell, and Mrs. Hua poured a cup of liquor for her husband and another cup for herself. The liquor was the best medicine, if only they could afford it, Old Hua said. But it did little to heal the wound left when their daughters were taken away, Mrs. Hua thought, and before she knew it, she felt her face wet with tears. Was she all right? Old Hua asked when he heard her sniffling, and she replied that it was the trick of the liquor and the wind howling outside.
Disturbed too were other souls. A female prison guard, off duty for the next two days, claiming she had a minor cold, woke up from a fitful dream and gasped for air; her husband, half-asleep, asked her if she felt unwell. A ridiculous nightmare, she answered, knowing enough not to tell him that she had fainted at work earlier that morning, when the warden had ordered that Gu Shan's vocal cords be severed so that she could not shout counterrevolutionary slogans at the last minute. The woman had been among the four guards assigned to pin the prisoner down for the procedure, but it had not gone as smoothly as promised by the warden and the doctor; the prisoner had struggled with a vehemence that one would not have imagined could come from her skinny body, and the female guard, whose nerve was usually up to her work, had fallen backward and bumped her head hard on the floor before the doctor finally finished the operation.
Unable to sleep, in another house, was an old orderly for the police station. I tell you, he said to his wife, who answered that she did not want to be reminded for another time about the bucket of blood he had washed off the police jeep that had transferred the prisoner. But it was unusual, he said; I tell you, it was a horrible thing, to clean up so much blood. What did they do to her? Why couldn't they wait until they got her onto the island to finish her off? He threw one question after another at his wife, who was no longer listening. He was getting old, after waiting for answers that his wife would not give him, the man thought sadly; he had fought in the war against the Japanese when he was a boy and he had seen plenty of bodies, but now he could not sleep because of a bucket of blood from a woman who was no longer alive. The story would make his old platoon friends laugh at the next reunion, the old man thought, and then he realized that he was the last one remaining who had not reported to the other side.