by Yan Lianke
The days went by, each one much the same. As summer reached its peak and the trees shed their remaining leaves, Jia Genzhu showed up at the school gate. He stood silently, watching Grandpa catch insects in his garden, and then said, in a small voice: ‘Hello, Uncle.’
Grandpa wheeled around, startled. What he saw was even more startling. It had been more than a fortnight since Grandpa had gone into the village, and a little more than three weeks since the sick villagers had moved out of the school. That was the last time he had seen Jia Genzhu, on the day he and the others had left. But the man squatting by Grandpa’s garden was not the Jia Genzhu he had known. This person was so emaciated he hardly seemed human. His face was sickly, and there were dark circles under his eyes. His eyes were so shrunken you could place an egg, or maybe a fist, in each socket. Crouched in the shade of the schoolyard wall, not far from my grave, he looked like a phantom, a spirit risen from the ground. His skin was desiccated, like he’d been left out in the sun and wind too long.
Genzhu, who had never called my grandpa ‘uncle’ in his life, seemed embarrassed by the endearment. His face cracked into an awkward smile.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Grandpa asked.
‘I’m dying.’ Genzhu’s smile grew as thick as tree bark. It seemed too heavy for his face, like it might peel away at any moment. ‘I doubt I’ll live more than a few days. Since I’ve got no future anyway, I thought I might as well come and have a talk with you.’
Grandpa left his vegetable patch and sat down at the foot of my grave. When he was settled on the ground, six feet above where I lay, he turned to Genzhu with a serious let’s-have-that-talk expression. It was just before sunset, and the heat was rolling off the plain. The evening humidity was seeping in. Sitting in the shade of the schoolyard wall, with a slight breeze cooling their skin, Grandpa and Genzhu felt almost comfortable.
A concert of cicadas buzzing in the distance made Grandpa think of Ma Xianglin playing on his fiddle. It had been almost a year since the musician had died, a year since his performance the previous autumn.
‘I’m going to die soon.’ Genzhu pushed his face close to Grandpa’s. ‘You can see it in my face, can’t you?’
Up close, Genzhu’s face looked even more ghastly.
‘It’s nothing to worry about,’ Grandpa assured him. ‘As soon as you get through this hot spell, you’ll be fine.’
‘You don’t have to lie to me, Uncle. But there’s something I need to tell you before I die. If I didn’t, I’d never rest in peace.’
‘So tell me.’
‘I will.’
‘Tell me.’
‘I’m going to.’
Grandpa smiled. ‘Just spit it out, son.’
‘Uncle, I can’t stop thinking about killing Ding Hui. All day long, I think about ways to kill him. At night, I dream about watching him die.’
Genzhu peered intently at Grandpa, trying to gauge his reaction. It was like he was a thief, trying to steal something in plain sight, and wondering whether or not anyone would stop him. He kept his eyes fixed on Grandpa’s face.
Grandpa stared back in shock. Genzhu’s words had hit him like a rock to the side of the head, leaving him dazed and speechless. He felt like the young man had asked to touch his cheek, then slapped him across the face. Grandpa’s face was as pale as a late-December moon, his mind as empty as the schoolyard, as barren as the plain. He looked at Genzhu searchingly, wondering whether his words were true or false, or if he’d just blurted out the first thing that came into his head. Although Genzhu talked of killing, his expression seemed kinder, his eyes gentler than they’d been on the day he left the school. It was as if he was simply asking Grandpa to borrow one of his things, or asking him to help search for something he’d lost.
The sun was burning towards the west now. A sharp blade of sunlight flashed around the corner of the schoolyard wall, leaving a neat rectangle of light on the ground.
‘Did you rob Liang’s tomb?’ Grandpa asked.
‘You really think I’d do that?’
‘Well, someone broke into the tomb and stole those coffins. Someone will have to answer for that.’
Genzhu thought for a moment. ‘I agree. Someone has to answer for that. But do you know what’s been happening in the village? Over the last two weeks, they’ve been digging up the bodies of girls who died of the fever, and marrying them off to dead boys in other villages. They’re selling our girls, digging up their bones and giving them to outsiders. My cousin Hongli was supposed to be married to Zhao Xiuqin’s niece Jade after he died, but yesterday we heard she’d been promised to some family from Willow Hamlet, the Ma family. When they came to dig up her body yesterday, they told us it was Ding Hui who arranged the match, and that he’s making money on both ends. He charged both families a fee of one hundred yuan, and Jade’s family got 3,000 for the dowry.’
Genzhu’s voice hardened. ‘I’m not the only one who wants to kill Ding Hui. There are a lot of people around here who’d be glad to see him dead. That’s why you need to tell him to stay away from Ding Village, or I might not be able to stop myself from bashing his head in. You’re a good man, Uncle. That’s why I’m telling you this. If you weren’t, I’d have let Ding Hui come back here and get beaten to death.
‘You know, I was only sixteen when I started selling my blood. One day, I ran into Ding Hui on my way home from school, and he tried to buy a pint of my blood. When I asked if it hurt, he said it was no worse than an ant bite. When I asked if it was dangerous, he said: “Don’t you want to get married someday, kid? If you’re not even willing to sell a pint of blood, how do you expect to afford a wife?”
‘That was how I got started selling blood. So you see, uncle, I’m not being unfair. I’ve got my reasons for wanting him dead, and so do a lot of other people. So you tell your son that if he doesn’t want his brains bashed in, he’d better stay away. If he shows up here, there’s no telling what we might do.’
At this point, Jia Genzhu stood up as if to leave. Grandpa assumed this meant the conversation was over, and that Genzhu had no other agenda. Apparently, he had come all this way to tell Grandpa he wanted to kill his son, and to pass on a warning to Ding Hui not to return to the village. The sun had set while they were talking, turning the plain into a great thick lake of blood. Genzhu was just about to leave, to walk into the sticky red sunset, when he stopped.
‘Oh, uncle?’ His words came out quickly. ‘I have just one more thing to ask, a favour. I don’t have long to live, so I swear this will be the last favour I ever ask you. You know your nephew and I are local cadres, so we share the village seal. He’s in pretty bad shape these days, just like me, and I doubt either of us will make it through the month. Anyway, the day before yesterday, he and I had a talk about which one of us should be buried with the seal. It turned into an argument because, of course, we both wanted it. So we finally decided to draw lots. He won the draw, which means he gets to be buried with the seal. But since then, I haven’t been able to get any sleep. I keep tossing and turning, thinking about how much I want that seal in my casket when I die. I know I’ve done some unfair things to you and your family in the past, but I’m a dying man, and I’m begging you to go to Ding Yuejin and reason with him. You and he are family, and I know how much he’s always respected you. If you ask him to give up the seal, I know he’ll listen.’
Genzhu stood between the vegetable patch and the school gate, gazing at Grandpa imploringly. The setting sun behind him was like a lake of blood, soaking into his clothes.
Grandpa, still sitting in the shade of the schoolyard wall, stood up. The upper half of his body emerged into the fading sunlight, while the lower half stayed in shadow.
‘Is it that important to be buried with the seal?’ Grandpa asked, squinting into the sunshine.
‘Maybe not, but I’ve got my heart set on it.’
‘Why not just carve a new seal?’
‘Then the new one would be fake. Let Ding Yuejin have the new seal, an
d I’ll take the old one. If you can convince him to give up the seal, I promise to stop thinking about ways to kill Ding Hui.’
Genzhu gazed at Grandpa for a few moments, then mumbled something under his breath, turned and walked away. Although there wasn’t much wind that day, Genzhu moved slowly and unsteadily, like he was afraid that a sudden gust might blow him over.
As Grandpa watched him stagger away, a thin reed being carried on the wind, he decided to stay out of this business about the seal. But as long as Jia Genzhu was still alive and able to walk, he decided he had better go into the city and tell my dad to stay away from the village, at least for a while.
Or maybe he’d tell him to stay away from the village for ever.
Either way, he decided to go to bed early, so he could get an early start the next morning.
CHAPTER TWO
1
Grandpa finally caught up with his son, but it wasn’t easy.
After a long and difficult journey, he tracked him down to a village called Cottonwood. It was the same model blood-selling village that the people of Ding Village had toured ten years earlier. This time, my dad was in Cottonwood gathering statistics on how many people had died of the fever, and how many among those were single. He made a list of all the dead unmarried men, women, boys and girls of Cottonwood, and then started taking applications from their families for his matchmaking service. The families had to provide a photo, or at least a physical description, of their dead relative. A team of helpers, university students that my dad had brought from the city, took notes on each person’s age, height, weight, face shape, skin tone and appearance. They set up a row of tables in the village centre and sat sifting through statistics and photos, and sorting the dead into categories. My dad paced back and forth along the row of tables, sometimes stopping to sit down and ask a question, or to give the students instructions.
My dad was a city person now, but he went out into the countryside every day, the same way that people in the countryside went out to their fields each morning. Knowing this, Grandpa went from village to village searching for my dad, until he caught up with him in Cottonwood. Ten years before, during the blood boom, Cottonwood had been a prosperous village. The tall buildings and white porcelain-tiled houses were still there, but they had become dilapidated. Grandpa stood sadly at the entrance to the village, staring at the ruin it had become. Big chunks of white tiles were missing from the walls of buildings, and what tiles remained were yellowed and weathered. The once-smooth tiles were as rough as sandpaper. Weeds sprouted between the cracks of tiled roofs and brick archways. Because of the drought, the weeds were as pale and withered as the grass that grew along the old Yellow River path.
As Grandpa walked along Cottonwood’s grand-sounding streets – Sunshine Boulevard, Harmony Avenue, Prosperity Lane and Happiness Road – he noticed that their surfaces were cracked and crumbling, littered with potholes and chunks of concrete. The houses lining the streets were exactly the same as in Ding Village: most had padlocks hanging from their metal gates, or white funeral scrolls pasted on the lintels. There were old and new scrolls with various poetic couplets, some of them poignant: ‘Grey-hairs bury their black-haired young / Saplings die, while old trees stay green.’ Others were resigned: ‘The dead are in a better place / but for the living, nothing’s changed.’ A few displayed a sense of gallows humour: ‘In hell you roast, in heaven you feast / but the food on earth is bittersweet.’ Some of the scrolls were plain white, while others had large circles where each ideograph would be. These new-style ‘blank couplets’ were made by inking the round base of a ceramic bowl, then pressing it against the paper. The vertical scrolls to the left and right of each door had seven large circles, and the horizontal scrolls above each door had four circles in a line. Everywhere Grandpa looked, the circles stared forth from doorways, like empty eyes.
Grandpa continued walking towards the centre of the village. When he came to Longevity Boulevard, he saw that the door of the social club was wide open. The place where the villagers had once watched television and played ping-pong, chess and mahjong seemed to have been abandoned. One of the door panels was missing, maybe stolen, and the other had two gaping holes. The courtyard was a shambles. It looked like a battle had taken place there. Doors and windowpanes were smashed, the dirt was littered with broken glass and piles of rubble, and the ground was overgrown with weeds. In the moist shade of the courtyard, the weeds grew tall and green, offering shelter to grasshoppers, frogs, moths and flying insects. The setting reminded Grandpa of a graveyard in an old ancestral shrine.
Further down the street, Grandpa came to an abandoned flour mill. Severed power lines hung like vines from the ceiling, and rats scampered across rows of disused machinery. The machines for grinding, milling and rolling oats had once been painted bright green, but now they were covered with a thick layer of rust.
Next to the mill was a structure that looked like it had been either a stable or a cowshed. Now that the villagers had stopped raising horses and cows, the structure was empty. Its thatched roof was gone, replaced by a weathered straw mat nailed to the wooden frame. Inside, there was a battered wooden feeding trough with a wide crack running down the centre. An old man and a little boy, probably his grandson, were playing near the trough and catching crickets.
Grandpa greeted the man like a long lost friend. ‘How’s your family? Are they well?’
‘His dad died,’ the man answered, pointing at the little boy. ‘And his mother remarried, but other than that, the family’s fine.’
Saddened by this news, Grandpa shook his head and sighed.
‘I’m looking for someone,’ Grandpa told the man, ‘and I wonder if you’ve seen him. Do you know a cadre named Ding, visiting from Wei county?’
‘Are you talking about Ding Hui, the chairman of the county task force?’ the old man asked.
‘Yes, yes, that’s him. He’s the one I’m looking for.’
‘Oh, Ding Hui is a great man, a wonderful man!’
The old man began telling Grandpa about all the wonderful things my dad had done for Cai county and for the village of Cottonwood. No matter that my dad was a Wei county cadre, he had provided low-cost coffins to the people of Cottonwood, which meant the dead had one less thing to worry about. Now he was giving solace to the living with his matchmaking service for the dead. The families of Cottonwood would never again have to worry about their unmarried relatives being lonely in the afterworld. My father had even found a match for the village idiot, a man who had sold a lot of blood while he was alive but never managed to hook a wife. Now that he was in his grave, my father had paired him with an eighteen-year-old city girl who had died in a car accident. For a dowry of only 5,000 yuan, the man’s mother was able to bury her son with a fever-free, virgin bride.
There was another village girl, a student at the best university in Beijing, who found out she had the fever, came home to Cottonwood and died a few weeks later. Although she was educated and pretty, when her parents began searching for a posthumous match, they didn’t ask for a penny of dowry money. All they wanted was to find a scholarly young man, someone who was their daughter’s intellectual equal, to keep her company in the afterworld. When a search of all the villages within a thirty-mile radius failed to turn up an appropriate match, they began to fret that they had let their daughter down. Then my dad arrived in Cottonwood with his stack of photos and files. He showed them a photo of a handsome young man who’d died of the fever while studying at a university down south. Within minutes, the two families had agreed to the match. They even held a big, fancy wedding banquet to celebrate the marriage of their dead children.
‘And it’s cheap!’ the man exclaimed. ‘The government only charges 200 yuan for each match, and it’s a huge relief for the families.’
Grandpa stared at the man for a few moments. ‘Do you know where this Ding fellow is now?’
‘Oh, sure,’ the man answered. ‘He’s doing business in Red Star Square. Just go up the
street until you reach the crossroads.’
Grandpa said goodbye and continued walking along Longevity Boulevard. Ten years ago, the paved concrete boulevard had been smooth, but now its surface was cracked and pitted. There were gaping potholes filled with dirt and weeds, and dry grass sprouting from the cracks in the pavement. Even the smooth sections were covered with a thick layer of dirt, raising clouds of dust as you passed. The restaurants, food stalls, clothing shops and kiosks lining the boulevard were shuttered, their owners gone to who knows where. Longevity Boulevard, like the other streets of Cottonwood, was deserted. You rarely saw any passers-by, and when you did, they were either very young or very old. All the villagers in their thirties and forties seemed to have disappeared. The few that Grandpa saw reminded him of Jia Genzhu: skeletally thin, covered with blisters and sores, with the shadow of death on their faces.
Grandpa knew that Cottonwood had prospered during the blood boom, but like Ding Village, it had been destroyed by blood, sold into ruin. People were dying, and villages were turning into ghost towns. Pretty soon, children and old people would be the only ones left.
Grandpa followed the dead, silent boulevard until he came to the crossroads marking Red Star Square, where the village blood station used to be. There had been a large, circular flower bed in the square, but the flowers were gone and the soil was trampled flat. This was where my dad and his helpers had set up shop, arranging marriages for the young, unmarried dead of Cottonwood. There were a few dozen villagers crowded around the tables, asking questions about this and that. Some were there to sign up dead sons, daughters, brothers or sisters for the matchmaking service, while others had come to check if there was any news on a suitable match.