by Yan Lianke
‘I don’t care about the money, but I have to get that seal back.’
‘How much did you lose?’ Grandpa insisted.
‘Like I said, the money doesn’t matter. But I have to find the seal.’
Grandpa stared at Li Sanren. He’d never seen him like this before, so agitated. After a moment, Grandpa asked quietly: ‘How do you suggest we find it?’
‘Search the school.’ Li Sanren’s voice was cold. ‘Shuiyang, you’ve been a teacher all your life, and you always taught your students not to steal. Now you’ve invited all these sick villagers to live in the school, and they’re thieving right under your nose.’
Without replying, Grandpa left the room. Li Sanren followed him out into the courtyard.
Already, the eastern horizon was a pool of golden light . . . a sea of golden flowers, covering the earth and sky, linking every plot and every field . . . flowers piled as high as mountain ranges, stretching into the distance . . . flowers tumbling into the schoolyard, drowning the school in petals . . .
The two-storey schoolhouse was quiet. All the residents were still asleep. On early winter mornings like this, it was warmer to stay huddled under the blankets.
Outside in the schoolyard, a magpie was singing from high in the branches of the paulownia tree. The magpie’s song was said to be a good omen, the herald of a joyous event. It could only mean that something wonderful had happened in the schoolyard: someone in the school must have cause to celebrate.
Hanging from a low branch of the tree was a square of sheet metal, a makeshift gong that functioned as a school bell. Removing a metal bar from a fork in the tree, Grandpa struck it against the gong, setting off a loud clanging. It was the signal for all the residents to assemble immediately in the schoolyard.
The metal sheet, long unused, was corroded with rust. As Grandpa struck it with the steel bar, flakes of rust fell from its surface. Since students had stopped coming to class, the ‘school bell’ had been out of use, reduced to an ornament, much like the flagpole that rose from a cement platform on the east side of the schoolyard. In the past, every school day had begun with the requisite flag-raising ceremony. Now the flagpole stood empty, a forgotten relic of days gone by.
But now, once more, the school was filled with a familiar sound: the clanging and banging of a gong echoing through the schoolyard like musket fire.
Residents wrapped in coats began appearing at the second-storey windows. ‘What’s going on?’ they shouted.
In the same tone of voice that he had used during his days as the village mayor, Li Sanren shouted back. ‘Assembly! Everyone gather in the yard for assembly!’
‘Did you catch the thief?’ someone asked.
‘Come down for assembly,’ Li Sanren hollered back, ‘and you’ll find out!’
Villagers began to emerge from the schoolhouse, some rubbing the sleep from their eyes, others pulling on or buttoning up clothes. They streamed into the schoolyard, filling the assembly ground between the paulownia tree and the basket- ball court. Uncle and Lingling were there, too. In the confusion, no one had seen them slip out of the storeroom and blend in with the crowd. Both were still adjusting their clothing, their faces glowing with such radiance that, if you didn’t know better, you’d never guess they were sick. They stood some distance apart, like two people who barely knew each other (and certainly hadn’t just spent the night together).
The sun was already up, bursting from the eastern horizon to signal the start of a new day: a fine day to catch a thief.
‘At this point, most of you are very sick,’ Grandpa began. ‘You’re here today, but could be gone tomorrow. Yet at a time like this, you’re still stealing . . . stealing from each other. Last night, someone stole money from Li Sanren.’
‘I don’t care about the money,’ Li Sanren interrupted loudly. ‘But the thief also took the official seal of the Ding Village party committee. For ten years, I’ve never let that seal out of my sight, and last night it was stolen.’
‘So I have no choice but to search the school,’ Grandpa said. Then, raising his voice: ‘Who will volunteer to help Li Sanren and I conduct a room-to-room search?’
Grandpa swept his gaze over the crowd of villagers. Before his eyes had even reached the other side, Uncle had elbowed his way to the front. ‘I’ll help search,’ he said excitedly. ‘After all, I’m a victim, too. That thief has got some nerve, stealing my cousin’s wife’s new jacket.’
At this, Lingling blushed as red as the sunrise. She watched as, stepping from the crowd like a conquering hero, Uncle took his place at Grandpa’s side.
After they had found two more volunteers, they set about searching the school from room to room and from top to bottom.
The search turned up two thieves. One was Zhao Xiuqin, the woman who cooked most of their meals. Zhao Xiuqin’s disease was in its maturity. The spots on her face had hardened into lumps, swollen to the size of cooked peas. The bumpy rash that covered her wrists and hands was different: clusters of bright-red bumps, the same shade as the sun over the plain. As soon as one bump disappeared, another rose to take its place. They crowded together jostling for space, itching so intolerably that she couldn’t help scratching them. Her constant scratching had caused the bumps to become infected; now festering sores, they gave off a foul, salty odour that she did her best to hide from the others.
Ordinarily, after six months of illness and multiple outbreaks of this kind of rash, a person would be nearing death. But Zhao Xiuqin was no ordinary person. She had suffered more outbreaks than most, and she was still very much alive.
Her husband Wang Baoshan, ten years her senior, had sold his blood and borrowed money to pay for her dowry. After she had spent the dowry helping her younger brother find a wife, Zhao Xiuqin turned to selling her own blood to help her husband repay the debt. Now, a decade later, she had the disease while her husband remained uninfected.
Six months earlier, when her fever first flared, she had spent days slumped on the ground of their courtyard, kicking her heels against the dirt and cursing her fate. ‘It isn’t fair,’ she moaned. ‘It just isn’t fair . . .’
When her husband tried to lift her from the ground, she scratched his face with her fingernails, drawing blood. ‘You did this to me, you bastard!’ she screamed. ‘It’s all your fault!’
For days she was inconsolable. She cursed and cried and stomped her feet, sending up clouds of dust. Then, just like that, the tantrums and the crying stopped. She resumed her usual household duties: cooking, feeding the chickens and bringing her husband his meals.
Now that she was living in the school, she was cooking not for her husband but for every sick person in the village. Not only was she cooking for them, she was stealing from them, too.
Zhao Xiuqin’s bed was in the corner of a first-grade classroom on the ground floor. Grandpa and Li Sanren moved from classroom to classroom, overturning beds, tearing off quilts and rifling through boxes and bundles of clothing. When they reached Zhao Xiuqin’s bed, she was not there. She had begun cooking well before sunrise. Day in and day out, from morning to night, she worked tirelessly and without complaint: cooking meals, washing bowls, scrubbing pots and doing whatever needed to be done. Besides that, she was an excellent cook.
That day, as the search party reached her bed, she was in the kitchen making breakfast. As Grandpa tore off her quilt and began searching under the bed, Li Sanren shook her pillow. He found it suspiciously heavy, as if it were filled with lead. When he ripped open the seams, a stream of white rice spilled onto the floor. Grains of rice cascaded to the floor, for everyone to see.
They were astounded, their faces frozen in shock. Never would they have imagined that the woman who cooked their meals was also the thief who’d been stealing their food supplies. A member of the search party was sent to the kitchen to fetch Zhao Xiuqin.
Meanwhile, on the second floor of the schoolhouse, my uncle was pulling another thief from his bed. Again, the identity of the thief came as a s
urprise: Zhao Dequan, a mild-mannered fifty-year-old farmer who had never raised his voice to anyone in his life.
While everyone else had assembled down in the schoolyard, Zhao Dequan had remained in bed. For the last few days, he’d been feeling weaker than usual, and hardly had the strength to walk unaided. The other residents, fearing that he wouldn’t live more than a few days, didn’t have the heart to disturb him. By the time Uncle and the others reached Zhao Dequan’s bedside, all the other upstairs classrooms had already been searched. They found Zhao lying on top of his quilt, resting. The sunlight streaming through the window made his face look red and parched, like a shrivelled corpse left out in the sun.
It shocked everyone to think that Zhao Dequan had been stealing. Zhao was a simple, guileless farmer who had spent his life working the land. When it came to selling his crops or doing business, he never bothered to read the scales, haggle over prices or quibble about who was owed what. Eight or ten years earlier, during the mad boom of buying and selling, he had sold his blood without once thinking to ask how much he ought to be paid for it. He took whatever amount the bloodheads offered, and allowed them to draw as much blood from his veins as they pleased.
When my father asked how much blood he should draw, Zhao Dequan had answered: ‘Take as much as you want. If my face turns yellow, then it’s time to stop.’
Naturally, my father chose the largest plasma bag and filled it near to bursting. By the time the needle was removed from Zhao’s arm, his face was jaundiced and his forehead beaded with perspiration. Dad gave him a few extra yuan for the additional blood he’d taken.
‘Ding Hui,’ Zhao said as he accepted the cash, ‘of all the blood merchants, you’re the one who treats me best.’
From then on, he kept coming back to sell his blood to my father.
Naturally, Zhao was the last person Uncle would have labelled a thief, and the last person anyone would have suspected of stealing the red silk jacket that had been part of Lingling’s bridal trousseau. In the bright sunlight that streamed through the classroom window, his features were mummified, corpse-like. His eyes, covered with a whitish film, were like the eyes of a dead fish. As he watched the members of the search party bustling back and forth, searching the beds around him, his dead-fish eyes gleamed with undisguised envy. It was the envy that a very sick man feels for those not quite as sick as he is. He envied them their energy, and the life left in them. His eyes were filled with tears and he heaved a heavy sigh. A long, drawn-out sigh.
Noticing Zhao’s despondence, a few of the residents tried to cheer him up with the standard jokes and wisecracks. ‘Hey, the sooner you die,’ one man grinned, ‘the sooner you get to be reborn!’ None of them imagined that they were talking to a thief, a man who had stolen a pretty piece of clothing from a pretty young bride.
The search group had finished the classroom and were about to leave without even bothering to search Zhao’s belongings when Uncle, for some reason, paused at the door and turned to stare at Zhao Dequan. For some reason he couldn’t have explained, even to himself, he marched over to the foot of Zhao’s bed, yanked back the covers and pulled out a cloth-wrapped bundle. When he unwrapped it, he found that it contained Lingling’s stolen bridal jacket.
Zhao Xiuqin was called from her kitchen.
Zhao Dequan was roused from his bed.
The thieves shared the same surname. They were a disgrace to the name of Zhao, and had brought shame upon Zhaos living everywhere.
The sun was rising and the schoolyard was beginning to warm up. A clean, fresh scent wafted in from distant fields. The birds were singing in the trees. Several dozen angry villagers crowded the courtyard, calling for Zhao Xiuqin to come out and face them, as if they’d known all along that she was a thief. There was no sense that they were wronging her, or accusing her unjustly. She was the one who had wronged them: she had let down the whole village.
After milling around the paulownia tree for a while, several people decided to go to the kitchen and fetch her. But if they had expected her to come out with her head hung low in shame, guilt written across her face, they were quite mistaken. There was not a hint of contrition in her expression as she emerged from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron. She seemed more annoyed than alarmed at being called away from work so abruptly. Confidently, even defiantly, she walked through the schoolyard and stood before the crowd like a storybook hero facing down a horde of enemies.
Grandpa stared at the pillow full of rice that was propped against the tree trunk, then turned his gaze to the cook.
‘Xiuqin, is it true?’ he asked. ‘Did you steal rice from the kitchen?’
‘No. What’s going on?’
‘I’ve heard the rumours that you used to steal crops from other people’s fields, but I never thought you’d steal grain from people in the same situation as you, people who are dying.’ Sadly, Grandpa looked down at the ground, now covered in rice that had spilled from the pillow. Zhao Xiuqin followed his eyes. When she saw the pillow, she froze, speechless.
A second later, she rushed forward and was clutching the pillow to her chest like it was a child someone was trying to snatch away from her. She squatted on the ground in front of Grandpa, cradling the pillow in her arms and stomping her feet upon the dusty ground.
‘You searched my things!’ she howled. ‘You heartless ingrate bastards . . . you searched my things and didn’t even tell me!
‘You’ve all got the fever, but you have no conscience, no gratitude . . . how could you search my bed without even asking me? Why should I have to wait on a bunch of sick people, when I could be home taking care of my own family? Every day I get up early to make you breakfast, and when you’ve eaten your fill, you just toss your bowls down and leave. Why should I get stuck washing your dirty dishes? It’s always me who has to go to the well and draw all the cooking and drinking water, but you don’t even try to conserve water . . . you waste a whole basin washing one little bowl. I’m as sick as any of the rest of you, and none of us is going to make it through the year. Seeing as how we’re all going to die soon, why should I be your unpaid slave? After all I do for you, is a little bit of extra rice each month too much to ask? If I were doing the same work anywhere else, I’d be getting that, plus at least a few hundred yuan per month. But have I ever asked to be paid for my work here, have I ever asked for so much as a penny? You’re always saying what a great cook I am, and how much you love my food. But why should I spend all day slaving in the kitchen for nothing, waiting on you hand and foot? All I wanted was a measly little bag of rice.’
All the while Zhao Xiuqin was shouting and accusing, she never shed a single tear. If there was a sob in her voice, it was the cry of a person who has been grievously wronged. When she had finished her tirade, she wiped her eyes as if she had been crying and looked around at the villagers.
‘Does your family need the rice that badly?’ Grandpa asked.
Zhao Xiuqin stared at him. ‘They have nothing. They haven’t got a stick of firewood or a blade of kindling to rub together.’
‘Then you should have told me!’ Grandpa shouted angrily. ‘I would have given you some of mine to give to them.’
‘I wasn’t going to beg from you. That would have been even worse. All I wanted was my due.’
This time, it was Grandpa’s turn to be speechless. There was nothing he could say. The crowd of villagers also seemed to have lost their tongues. The tables had turned: now they were the ones who had wronged Zhao Xiuqin, rather than the other way around. At that moment, Uncle and several of the village men appeared, leading Zhao Dequan down the stairs of the schoolhouse.
Zhao Dequan displayed none of the cook’s courage or forcefulness. Although he was a man, he was neither as gutsy – nor as brave – as Zhao Xiuqin. With his pale, jaundiced face sweating profusely, despite the slight mid-winter chill, he looked like a prisoner being led to an execution ground. His small, shuffling steps made him appear to be moving backward rather than forward.
> As he reached the bottom of the staircase, Zhao Dequan raised his head and caught sight of the villagers gathered in the schoolyard. He turned to say something to my uncle, and Uncle answered something back. When Zhao Dequan turned around again, his face seemed to have turned even more deathly pale. It was obvious to everyone that he was in the final stages of the disease, nearing the end of his life. His weight-loss had left him stick-thin. The coat that had once fitted him like a glove hung from his shrunken frame; his trousers were two gigantic buckets that pooled around his ankles and flapped against his legs when he walked. With his twig-brittle bones and leaf-thin skin, he seemed not to walk so much as flutter . . . no longer a man, but a phantom. In this way, he floated into their midst, and stood before the crowd with his head hung low, like a student who had been caught cheating during an exam and had been called before the entire class.
Small beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead; his skin alternating between a sickly yellow and an even more sickly white. The villagers, who had been so focused on Zhao Xiuqin now turned their attention to Zhao Dequan. It was impossible to believe that this wisp of a man, this phantom, could have stolen Lingling’s red silk jacket. She could hardly believe it herself. She stared in confusion at Zhao Dequan, then at Uncle, who was holding her jacket.
‘I found this at the foot of his bed, beneath the covers,’ Uncle said, as he handed her the jacket.
Slowly, painfully, Zhao Dequan squatted on the ground and hung his head in shame. It was as though he had just witnessed the passing not of a jacket, but of his life’s honour. His face looked sallower than before: as if made of wax, with the eyes of a dead fish. He stared fixedly at the tips of his toes, shrinking in on himself like a whipped dog cowering in a corner.