Dream of Ding Village

by Yan Lianke

  Leaving aside his work, my dad went over to meet them at the gate. ‘If it hadn’t been for all my hard work,’ he told them, ‘you wouldn’t even have cooking oil.’

  Then he told them that there was one village of only 200 people that had lost half its population in less than a year. By comparison, Ding Village was lucky. Did they really want to make a big fuss about coffins, when there were people who needed them more?

  Then he told them about another village where 300 of the 500 residents had the fever. Did they really want to take coffins from people like that?

  The villagers couldn’t argue.

  Seeing that they had nothing more to say, my dad left them standing at the gate and resumed his digging. Winter would soon end; spring was on its way: when it came to planting spicy mustard greens, all you had to do was wait for the first day of spring, scatter the seeds on the ground, and water them every two days. Within a week, you would have sprouts. Within a fortnight, you’d have tiny little pale, blue-green plants that filled the air with their pungent scent.

  Just about the time my dad was planting his mustard greens, there was another death in the village. The man who had died was not yet thirty, and his family couldn’t afford to pay for his coffin. This was a topic of much conversation and gossip among the villagers. Finally, one of the man’s relatives came to see my father.

  ‘Ding Hui,’ he said. ‘We’re all brothers here. Can’t you ask the higher-ups to give us a coffin?’

  ‘If I could have got coffins,’ my father said awkwardly, ‘don’t you think I would have asked for them? I managed to get you cooking oil and firecrackers for New Year, didn’t I?’

  Realising that my father would do no more for him, the man left.

  Soon, the mustard greens my father had planted were coming up strong, filling our courtyard with their pungent scent. The butterflies came. They landed briefly then fluttered away. So did the bees. Mustard greens were far too spicy to attract the butterflies and not nearly sweet enough to tempt the bees.

  But in the end, our little vegetable patch would prove to be seductive.

  Before long, our family would enjoy all the sweet delights of spring.

  VOLUME 4

  CHAPTER ONE

  1

  New Year passed. One by one, the days of the first lunar month went by. The first, the fifth, the fifteenth . . . each day had been and gone, but nothing much had changed. The sun shone warm, the winds blew cold. Medicinal herbs were boiled and drunk. People sickened, died and were buried.

  The burials were a reminder of the good old days in the school, days of talk and laughter. The sick living together as a community, in good company and good cheer. Since the sick villagers had gone home for New Year, to their lonely rooms and silent courtyards, the mild cases had become serious, the serious cases terminal, and the terminal cases had passed away. Everyone wanted to resume their communal life in the school, but after the spat with my dad about coffins – during which some nasty things were said – they were embarrassed to face Grandpa. After all, the man they had cursed was still Grandpa’s son, his flesh and blood.

  One day after breakfast, Zhao Dequan, Ding Yuejin, Jia Genzhu, Ding Zhuxi, Zhao Xiuqin and some of the others were outside, enjoying the sunshine. The sun hung overhead, warming the village. Uncle and Lingling were there as well, standing apart from the group, gazing into one another’s eyes like lovers. Or like thieves, thieves of love.

  Their stolen moment was interrupted by someone saying: ‘Who is going to tell Professor Ding that we want to move back into the school?’

  Uncle laughed and turned to face the others. ‘I’ll go,’ he volunteered. There was a round of murmurs as everyone agreed that, of course, Uncle was the perfect man for the job.

  ‘But who’s going to go with me?’

  Before anyone could answer, Uncle said: ‘How about you, Lingling?’

  Lingling seemed hesitant, but Zhao Xiuqin urged her. ‘Yes, Lingling, you go. You’re not that sick, and your legs are still strong.’

  And so Uncle and Lingling left the village together and walked towards the school.

  It wasn’t a long walk. The fields on both sides of the road were a sea of green, and the mossy scent of newly sprouted wheat drifted through the sunlit air. The weather was clear and cloudless, the air above the plain fresh and intoxicating. Beneath the empty sky, the distant villages of Willow Hamlet, Yellow Creek and Two-Li crouched like shadows on the horizon. Lingling and Uncle were on the outskirts of the village. Although they were not far from the nearest houses there seemed to be no one else around. At this hour, most people were gathered in the village centre, eating and sunning themselves. Walking shoulder to shoulder with Lingling, uncle glanced around carefully before taking her hand.

  Lingling looked back at the village in alarm.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Uncle. ‘We’re alone.’

  ‘Did you miss me?’ she asked, smiling.

  ‘Why, didn’t you miss me?’

  ‘No.’ Lingling’s face turned serious.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘I’ve been worried I’m getting sicker. I might die any day now.’

  Peering at her face, Uncle saw that Lingling’s colour wasn’t as good as it had been before New Year. There was an undertone to her normally rosy skin, something putrid and dark beneath the surface, like dirty water soaking through red cloth. A dozen more spots had appeared on her forehead, shiny reddish-brown lumps capped with white. Uncle examined Lingling’s wrist and the back of her hand, but found no new blemishes there. Her skin retained something of the glow of youth: the glow of a new bride, a woman in her early twenties.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ Uncle assured her. ‘It’s nothing to worry about.’

  ‘How would you know?’

  ‘I’ve been sick for almost a year, so I’m practically a doctor myself.’ Then, smiling: ‘Now, let’s take a look at those hips of yours.’

  Lingling stood and stared at Uncle.

  ‘Come on, Lingling, I missed you so much I could hardly stand it.’ Gazing at Lingling’s hips, uncle began trying to pull her into a grassy field by the side of the road. The field must have lain fallow for some time, because the grass was knee-high in places, even higher in others. Now in late winter, the grass was dry and brittle, but you could tell how luxuriant it had once been. The withered grass gave off a mildewed scent that somehow seemed moister than fresh green grass or newly sprouted wheat.

  When Lingling refused to go into the field with him, Uncle pleaded. ‘Didn’t you miss me at all?’

  ‘I did,’ she admitted, which only made Uncle tug at her hand harder.

  ‘But what’s the point,’ she asked, ‘when there’s no reason to go on living?’

  ‘There is no point, but every day you’re alive, you have to find some reason to go on living.’

  Finally, Uncle managed to coax Lingling off the road. Hand in hand, they walked into the field, trampling the grass beneath their feet. When they came to a patch where the grass grew higher, they lay down together, flattening the grass with their bodies.

  There, in the tall grass, they did what men and women do.

  They did it with a frenzy. They were mad for each other, their sickness forgotten, as if they’d never been unwell. In the sunlight that played across their bodies, Uncle saw that the spots on Lingling’s skin were swollen with blood, glowing like plump red agates. The lumps on her buttocks and back were bright-red dots, like twinkling lights along a big city street. In her excitement, Lingling’s face took on a rosy hue, a faint red glow that drove away the shadows underneath. In that moment, Uncle discovered that Lingling had not just youth, but beauty: her large eyes, moist and dark; the bridge of her nose as straight and tall as a chopstick standing at attention. When they had first lain down in the tall grass, sheltered from the wind and prying eyes, she had seemed as withered and dry as the grass around her, but now she was radiant. The spots that covered her body only seemed to highlight the tend
erness of her youth, the pale softness of her skin. Looking at her, Uncle was once again sent into a frenzy. He was mad for her. She rose to his desire, embracing his lust like the tender young grass on the plain welcomes the warmth of spring.

  When the frenzy was over, there was sweat, and there were tears. Lingling and Uncle lay on their backs, side by side on the grass, squinting up at the sun.

  ‘I wish we could get married,’ Uncle said.

  ‘I doubt I’ll live through the year.’

  ‘I’d marry you even if you only had a month to live.’

  ‘What about your wife?’

  ‘Who cares about her?’

  Lingling rolled away from Uncle and sat up. After a moment, she said: ‘Forget it. We’ll both be dead soon, anyway.’

  Mulling this over, Uncle had to agree: divorce and remarriage didn’t seem worth the trouble. They stood up, looked down at the trampled patch of grass they had made, and laughed. Then they continued towards the school, trying to mask their smiles.

  When they arrived, they found Grandpa tidying up the large classroom where the residents had held their meetings. He was wiping the blackboard with a damp rag, erasing crude chalk drawings of dogs, pigs and other animals with the names of various villagers written underneath. When Grandpa saw Uncle grinning at the door of the classroom, he asked: ‘Did you draw these?’

  Uncle ignored the question. ‘Everyone wants to move back into the school, Dad.’

  ‘No.’ Grandpa shook his head. ‘It’s time for the kids to start classes again.’

  ‘But what use is school when all the adults are dying?’ said Uncle.

  ‘After the adults are dead, the kids will still be here,’ replied Grandpa.

  ‘But who’s going to raise them when their parents are gone?’ Lingling asked, searching Grandpa’s face. She was suddenly struck by how much he looked like her husband’s father, the father-in-law she’d never met. Although her father-in-law was long dead by the time she married into the family, she’d seen his photograph propped on the long table that served as an ancestral shrine. He was a thin, wiry man who gazed wistfully at the camera, as if he were reluctant to leave this world. Because of the family resemblance, and perhaps because of her relationship with Grandpa’s son, Lingling now looked upon Grandpa as a sort of substitute father-in-law.

  ‘If their parents can live longer by moving into the school,’ she reasoned, ‘isn’t that a few less days that the kids will be orphans, a few less days of grief?’

  Grandpa hung the rag from a nail on the blackboard and dusted the chalk from his hands. ‘All right,’ he agreed. ‘Tell everyone they can move back.’

  Uncle and Lingling went back to the village to tell the others the good news. Once they had left the schoolyard behind them, they held hands. As they passed the grassy field, they glanced at each other and smiled. Then, without a word, they left the road and walked into the field together, hand in hand.

  Hidden by the grass, they sat.

  Hidden in the grass, they lay.

  The sun shone down upon their naked skin.

  2

  Before the villagers could move back into the school, there was the matter of food supplies to be dealt with. Each resident was still required to donate a certain amount of wheat flour, corn meal, rice, beans and legumes each month. The first collection was taken up in the centre of the village, with Ding Yuejin serving as accountant. After he had weighed the grain, separated the coarse from the fine and noted any donations that were over or under, he had each villager place his or her contribution into communal sacks. As the cook, Zhao Xiuqin was exempt from the food quota, but she was on hand to help collect donations. As she was tying one of the sacks with rope, she discovered that someone had stuffed bricks in with the flour. There were four bricks of 5lbs each, which meant that someone had shorted the group by 20lbs of flour. Rummaging in another sack of flour, she found not bricks, but stones the size of large serving bowls. And in a sack of rice, she unearthed not bricks or stones but tiles weighing several pounds each.

  Zhao Xiuqin angrily tossed the stones, bricks and tiles into the middle of the street, where they formed a large, dusty heap. The stones were as big as a man’s head. Taken together, the contents of the flour-dusted heap must have weighed at least 100lbs. So far, the food contributions totalled four and a half sacks of flour, two and a half sacks of rice, a few sacks of corn meal and slightly more than one bag of beans. The stones, bricks and tiles were enough to fill more than a whole sack. The villagers gathered around the pile, shaking their heads and voicing their disapproval.

  ‘My goodness, what an awful thing to do. With everyone so sick, this is no time to be cheating.’

  ‘We’re all going to die anyway! Who’d pull such a rotten stunt?’

  Holding up a flour-coated brick, Zhao Xiuqin shouted: ‘Too much of a coward to come forward, are you? Everyone was supposed to give fifty pounds of flour, but these bricks must weigh at least twenty pounds! You rotten, cheating bastard . . . because you shorted us, when we run out of food to eat, everyone’s going to think I stole it!’

  Raising the brick higher, the cook began to pace back and forth in front of the sacks of food. ‘Take a look! You all said I was the village thief, but the worst I ever did was take a scallion from a field, or dig up a turnip to feed my husband and son. Or pick a cucumber to quench my thirst on a hot day. But someone puts twenty pounds of bricks in a bag of flour, or a couple of stones in with the rice, and you don’t call that thieving?’ She tossed down the brick in disgust and turned her attention to one of the flour-covered stones. Before she got sick, Zhao Xiuqin could easily have lifted several such stones, or carried a heavy load of them in baskets on a shoulder pole, but the fever had made her weak. It took several tries before she managed to lift the stone from the ground. Pacing back and forth in front of the villagers, cradling the stone in her arms like an infant, she raised her voice.

  ‘See how heavy this stone is? I can hardly lift it! I want to know what stupid idiot thinks this is edible. I’d like to see you carry this home and cook it up in a pot!’ Zhao Xiuqin dropped the stone to the ground with a thud, then assumed a very male posture: one foot on the stone, the other on the ground, fists on hips and arms outstretched.

  ‘So this is what you’re cooking at home every day, rocks instead of rice? Your kids are swallowing stones and shitting pebbles? You’re serving your old folks bricks and broken tiles?’

  At last, exhausted by her pacing and cursing, Zhao Xiuqin plopped down on one of the sacks of grain. The food collection had begun just after lunch. By now, the sun had solidified its position in the sky, and was smothering the village in warmth. At this time of year, as winter lingered into spring, most people still wore padded coats or jackets draped over their shoulders. Some of the older villagers were dressed in sheepskin jackets to ward off the chill. Despite the lingering cold, the scholar trees had begun to bloom; translucent green and yellow buds glistened on their branches like droplets of water. On this day, the whole of Ding Village had turned out to watch the food collection. This, in itself, was an exciting event. Finding stones in among the sacks of food was even more thrilling. The village hadn’t seen this much excitement in years, not since the fever had arrived. Young and old alike left their houses to come and stare, to crowd around the pile of stones and bricks and curse the cheating scoundrel who had done it.

  And, of course, to watch Zhao Xiuqin curse the cheating scoundrel who had done it.

  Jia Genzhu, a young man who had become ill only recently, wanted to live in the school more than anyone. Once he was living in the school, his mother wouldn’t have to spend her days crying in secret, and his wife wouldn’t have to worry about him infecting her or their child. That was why he had donated only the whitest rice and the finest flour. He’d felt a bit put out when he’d seen the quality of the other donations: coarser grain and rice that wasn’t quite so white. Now, staring at the pile of stones and bricks, he felt positively cheated. ‘Fuck it!
’ he cursed. ‘Fuck this! Give me back my food . . . I’m not moving into the school!’

  ‘Fine,’ said Uncle. ‘But if you want a refund, you’ll forfeit ten pounds of flour.’

  ‘Why is that?’ Jia Genzhu asked, staring in disbelief.

  ‘Because if everyone asks for their food back, we’ll come up short. We can’t very well refund bricks and stones, can we?’

  Jia Genzhu thought this over. ‘Oh, well. I suppose I might as well move into the school.’

  The other people who had donated food crowded around the pile of rubble, grumbling as they examined the flour-covered bricks and stones. The sun was now sneaking west, flooding the village streets with red. A late-winter wind whistled across the plain, leaving a chill in the air. The villagers had to stamp their feet and rub their hands to keep warm.

  At that moment, my grandfather arrived on the scene. He had grown impatient waiting for everyone to arrive at the school, so he had come out to meet them. When the villagers explained to him what had happened, he stared at the pile of bricks and stones.

  ‘So if we don’t find out who did this, you’re not going to move into the school?’ asked Grandpa.