Grandma had a premonition that her life was about to change in extraordinary ways.
In some significant aspects, heroes are born, not made. Heroic qualities flow through a person’s veins like an undercurrent, ready to be translated into action. During her first sixteen years, Grandma’s days had been devoted to embroidery, needlework, paper cutouts, foot binding, the endless glossing of her hair, and all other manner of domestic things in the company of neighbour girls. What, then, was the source of her ability and courage to deal with the events she encountered in her adult years? How was she able to temper herself to the point where even in the face of danger she could conquer her fears and force herself to act heroically? I’m not sure I know.
Grandma wept for a long time without feeling much true grief; as she cried, she relived the joys and pleasures of her past, even the suffering and sorrow. The sounds of crying seemed to be a distant musical accompaniment to the beautiful and hideous images appearing and reappearing in her mind. Finally, she mused that human existence is as brief as the life of autumn grass, so what was there to fear from taking chances with your life?
‘Time to leave, Little Nine,’ Great-Granddad said, calling her by her childhood name.
Leave! Leave! Leave!
Grandma asked for a basin of water to wash her face. Then she applied some powder and rouge. As she looked in the mirror, she loosened her hairnet, releasing long, flowing hair that quickly covered her back with its satiny sheen, all the way down to the curve of her legs. When she pulled it across her shoulder with her left hand, it spilled over her breast, where she combed it out with a pear-wood comb. Grandma had uncommonly thick, shiny, black hair that lightened a bit at the tips. Once it was combed out smooth, she twisted it into large ebony blossoms, which she secured with four silver combs. Then she trimmed her fringe so that it fell just short of her eyebrows. After rewrapping her feet, she put on a pair of white cotton stockings, tied her trouser cuffs tightly, and slipped on a pair of embroidered slippers that accentuated her bound feet.
It was Grandma’s tiny feet that had caught the attention of Shan Tingxiu, and it was her tiny feet that had aroused the passions of the sedan bearer Yu Zhan’ao. She was very proud of them. Even a pock-faced witch is assured of marriage if she has tiny bound feet, but no one wants a girl with large unbound feet, even if she has the face of an immortal. Grandma, with her bound feet and lovely face, was one of the true beauties of her time. Throughout our long history, the delicate, pointed tips of women’s feet have been viewed as genital organs, in a way, from which men have derived a sort of aesthetic pleasure that sets their sexual juices flowing.
Now that she was ready, Grandma left the house, clicking her feet. A blanket had been thrown over the back of the family’s little donkey, in whose glistening eyes Grandma noticed a spark of human understanding. She swung her leg over the donkey’s back and straddled it, unlike most women. Great-Grandma had tried to get her to ride sidesaddle, but Grandma dug in her heels and the donkey started off down the road, its rider sitting proudly on its back, head up and eyes straight ahead.
Once she was on her way, Grandma didn’t look back, and although Great-Granddad was holding the reins at first, when they were out of the village she took them from him and guided the donkey herself, leaving him to trot along behind her.
Another thunderstorm had struck during the three days. Grandma noticed a section of sorghum the size of a millstone where the leaves were singed and shrivelled, a spot of emaciated whiteness amid the surrounding green. Assuming that lightning was the culprit, she was reminded of the previous year, when lightning had struck and killed her friend Beauty, a girl of seventeen, literally frying her hair and burning her clothes to cinders. A design had been scorched into her back, which some people said was the script of heavenly tadpoles.
Rumours spread that greed had killed Beauty, who had caused the death of an abandoned baby. The details were lurid. On her way to market one day, she heard a bawling baby by the roadside. When she unwrapped the swaddling clothes she found a pink, newborn baby boy and a note that said: ‘Father was eighteen, mother seventeen, the moon was directly overhead, the three stars were in the western sky, when our son, Road Joy, was born. Father had already married Second Sister Zhang, a girl with unbound feet from West Village. Mother will marry Scar Eye from East Village. It breaks our hearts to abandon our newborn son. Snot runs down his father’s chin, tears stream down his mother’s cheeks, but we stifle our sobs so no one will hear us. Road Joy, Road Joy, our joy on the road, whoever finds you will be your parents. We have wrapped you in a yard of silk, and have left twenty silver dollars. We beg a kindhearted passerby to store up karma by saving our son’s precious life.’
People said that Beauty took the silk and the silver dollars, but abandoned the infant in the sorghum field, for which heaven punished her by sending down a bolt of lightning. Grandma refused to believe the rumours about her best friend, but as she pondered the tragic mysteries of life her heart was gripped by desolation and melancholy.
The rain-soaked road was still wet and pitted by pelting raindrops; soft mud, with a light oily sheen, filled the holes. Once again the donkey left its hoofprints in the mud. Katydids hid in the grass and on the sorghum leaves, vibrating their long silken beards and sawing their transparent wings to produce a cheerless sound. The long summer was about to end, and the sombre smell of autumn was in the air. Swarms of locusts, sensing the change of season, dragged their seed-filled bellies out of the sorghum fields onto the road, where they bored their hindquarters into the hard surface to lay their eggs.
Great-Granddad snapped off a sorghum stalk and smacked the rump of the weary donkey, which tucked its tail between its legs and shot forward a few paces before resuming its unhurried pace. Great-Granddad must have been feeling very pleased with himself as he walked behind the donkey, for he began singing snatches of popular local opera, making up the words as he went along. ‘Wu Dalang drank poison, how bad he felt. . . . His seven lengths of intestines and the eight lobes of his lungs lurched and trembled. . . . The ugly man took a beautiful wife, bringing calamity to his door. . . . Ah – ye – ye . . . Big Wu’s belly is killing him . . . waiting for Second Brother to complete his mission . . . to return home and avenge his murder. . . .’
Grandma’s heart thumped wildly as she listened to Great-Granddad’s crazy song. The image of that scowling young man, sword in hand, appeared in a flash. Who was he? What was he up to? It dawned on her that, even though they didn’t know each other, their lives were already as close as fish and water. Their sole encounter had been lightning quick and was over in a flash, like a dream, yet not like a dream. She had been shaken to the depths of her soul, overcome by spirits. Resign yourself to your fate, she thought as she heaved a long sigh.
Grandma let the donkey proceed freely as she listened to her dad’s fractured rendition of the Wu Dalang song. A breath of wind and a puff of fire, and there they were, in Toad Hollow. The donkey kept its nostrils closed tight as it pawed the ground, refusing to go any farther, even when Great-Granddad smacked it on the rump with his sorghum switch. ‘Get moving, you bastard! Get going, you rotten donkey bastard!’ The switch sang out against the donkey’s rump, but instead of moving forward, it backed up.
An awful stench assailed Grandma’s nostrils. Quickly dismounting and covering her nose with her sleeve, she tugged on the reins to get the donkey moving. It looked up at her, its mouth open, tears filling its eyes. ‘Donkey,’ she said, ‘grit your teeth and walk past it. There’s no mountain that can’t be scaled and no river that can’t be forded.’ Moved by her words, it raised its head and brayed, then galloped forward, dragging her along so fast her feet barely touched the ground and her clothes fluttered in the wind like red clouds tumbling in the sky. She glanced at the sham highwayman’s corpse as they passed. A scene of filth and corruption greeted her eyes: a million fat maggots had gorged themselves until only a few pieces of rotting flesh covered his bones.
G
randma climbed back onto the donkey after they’d managed to drag one another past Toad Hollow. Gradually she became aware of the smell of sorghum wine floating on the northeast wind. She whipped up her courage, but as she drew nearer to the climactic scene of the drama her sense of fear and foreboding was as strong as ever. Steam rose from the ground under the blazing sun, but shivers ran down her spine. The village where the Shans lived was far away, and Grandma, surrounded by the thick aroma of sorghum wine, felt as if the marrow in her spine had frozen solid. A man in the field to her right began to sing in a loud, full voice:
Little sister, boldly you move on
Your jaw set like a steel trap
Bones as hard as cast bronze
From high atop the embroidery tower
You toss down the embroidered ball
Striking me on the head
Now join me in a toast with dark-red sorghum wine.
‘Hey there, opera singer, come out! That’s terrible singing! Just awful!’ Great-Granddad shouted towards the sorghum field.
3
FATHER FINISHED HIS fistcake as he stood on the withered grass, turned blood-red by the setting sun. Then he walked gingerly up to the edge of the water. There on the stone bridge across the Black Water River the lead truck, its tyres flattened by the barrier of linked rakes, crouched in front of the other three. Its railings and fenders were stained by splotches of gore. The upper half of a Japanese soldier was draped over one of the railings, his steel helmet hanging upturned by a strap from his neck. Dark blood dripped into it from the tip of his nose. The water sobbed as it flowed down the riverbed. The heavy, dull rays of sunlight were pulverised by tiny ripples on its surface. Autumn insects hidden in the damp mud beneath the water plants set up a mournful chirping. Sorghum in the fields sizzled as it matured. The fires were nearly out in the third and fourth trucks; their blackened hulks crackled and split, adding to the discordant symphony.
Father’s attention was riveted by the sight and sound of blood dripping from the Japanese soldier’s nose into the steel helmet, each drop splashing crisply and sending out rings of concentric circles in the deepening pool. Father had barely passed his fifteenth birthday. The sun had nearly set on this ninth day of the eighth lunar month of the year 1939, and the dying embers of its rays cast a red pall over the world below. Father’s face, turned unusually gaunt by the fierce daylong battle, was covered by a layer of purplish mud. He squatted down upriver from the corpse of Wang Wenyi’s wife and scooped up some water in his hands; the sticky water oozed through the cracks between his fingers and dropped noiselessly to the ground. Sharp pains racked his cracked, swollen lips, and the brackish taste of blood seeped between his teeth and slid down his throat, moistening the parched membranes. He experienced a satisfying pain, and even though the taste of blood made his stomach churn, he scooped up handful after handful of water, drinking it down until it soaked up the dry, cracked fistcake in his stomach. He stood up straight and took a deep breath of relief.
Night was definitely about to fall; the ridge of the sky’s dome was tinged with the final sliver of red. The scorched smell from the burned-out hulks of the trucks had faded. A loud bang made Father jump. He looked up, just in time to see exploded bits of truck tyres settling slowly into the river like black butterflies, and countless kernels of Japanese rice – some black, some white – soaring upward, then raining down on the still surface of the river. As he spun around, his eyes settled on the tiny figure of Wang Wenyi’s wife lying at the edge of the river, the blood from her wounds staining the water around her. He scrambled to the top of the dike and yelled: ‘Dad!’
Granddad was standing on the dike, the flesh on his face wasted away by the day’s battle, the bones jutting out beneath his dark, weathered skin. In the dying sunlight Father noticed that Granddad’s short-cropped hair was turning white. With fear in his aching heart, Father nudged him timidly.
‘Dad,’ he said, ‘Dad! What’s wrong with you?’
Tears were running down Granddad’s face. He was sobbing. The Japanese machine gun that Detachment Leader Leng had so magnanimously left behind sat at his feet like a crouching wolf, its muzzle gaping.
‘Say something, Dad. Eat that fistcake, then drink some water. You’ll die if you don’t eat or drink.’
Granddad’s head drooped until it rested on his chest. He seemed to lack the strength to support its weight. He knelt at the top of the dike, holding his head in his hands and sobbing. After a moment, or two, he looked up and cried out: ‘Douguan, my son! Is it all over for us?’
Father stared wide-eyed and fearfully at Granddad. The glare in his diamondlike pupils embodied the heroic, unrestrained spirit of Grandma, a flicker of hope that shone and lit up Granddad’s heart.
‘Dad,’ Father said, ‘don’t give up. I’ll work hard on my shooting, like when you shot fish at the inlet to perfect your seven-plum-blossom skill. Then we’ll go settle accounts with that rotten son of a bitch Pocky Leng!’
Granddad sprang to his feet and bellowed three times – half wail, half crazed laughter. A line of dark-purple blood trickled out of the corner of his mouth.
‘That’s it, son, that’s the way to talk!’
He picked up one of Grandma’s fistcakes from the dark earth, bit off a chunk, and swallowed it. Cake crumbs and flecks of bubbly blood stuck to his stained teeth. Father heard Granddad’s painful cries as the dry cake stuck in his throat and saw the rough edges make their way down his neck.
‘Dad,’ Father said, ‘go drink some water to soak up the cake in your belly.’
Granddad stumbled along the dike to the river’s edge, where he knelt among the water plants and lapped up the water like a draught animal. When he’d had his fill, he drew his hands back and buried his head in the river, holding it under the water for about half the time it takes to smoke a pipeful of tobacco. Father started getting nervous as he gazed at his dad, frozen like a bronze frog at the river’s edge. Finally, Granddad jerked his dripping head out of the water and gasped for breath. Then he walked back up the dike to stand in front of Father, whose eyes were glued to the cascading drops of water. Granddad shook his head, sending forty-nine drops, large and small, flying like so many pearls.
‘Douguan,’ he said, ‘come with Dad. Let’s go see the men.’
Granddad staggered down the road, weaving in and out of the sorghum field on the western edge, Father right on his heels. They stepped on broken, twisted stalks of sorghum and spent cartridges that gave off a faint yellow glint. Frequently they bent down to look at the bodies of their fallen comrades, who lay amid the sorghum, deathly grimaces frozen on their faces. Granddad and Father shook them in hope of finding one who was alive; but they were dead, all of them. Father’s and Granddad’s hands were covered with sticky blood. Father looked down at two soldiers on the westernmost edge of the field: one lay with the muzzle of his shotgun in his mouth, the back of his neck a gory mess, like a rotten wasps’ nest; the other lay across a bayonet buried in his chest. When Granddad turned them over, Father saw that their legs had been broken and their bellies slit open. Granddad sighed as he withdrew the shotgun from the one soldier’s mouth and pulled the bayonet from the other’s chest.
Father followed Granddad across the road, into the sorghum field to the east, which had also been swept by machine-gun fire. They turned over the bodies of more soldiers lying strewn across the ground. Bugler Liu was on his knees, bugle in hand, as though he were blowing it: ‘Bugler Liu!’ Granddad called out excitedly. No response. Father ran up and nudged him. ‘Uncle Liu!’ he shouted, as the bugle dropped to the ground. When Father looked more closely, he discovered that the bugler’s face was already as hard as a rock.
In the lightly scarred section of field some few dozen paces from the dike, Granddad and Father came upon Fang Seven, whose guts had spilled out of his belly, and another soldier, named Consumptive Four, who, after taking a bullet in the leg, had fainted from blood loss. Holding his bloodstained hand above the man’s m
outh, Granddad detected a faint sign of dry, hot breath from his nostrils. Fang Seven had stuffed his own intestines back into his abdomen and covered the gaping wound with sorghum leaves. He was still conscious. When he spotted Granddad and Father, his lips twitched and he said haltingly, ‘Commander . . . done for . . . When you see my old lady . . . give some money. . . . Don’t let her remarry. . . . My brother . . . no sons . . . If she leaves . . . Fang family line ended. . . .’ Father knew that Fang Seven had a year-old son, and that there was so much milk in his mother’s gourdlike breasts that he was growing up fair and plump.
‘I’ll carry you back, little brother,’ Granddad said.
He bent over and pulled Fang Seven onto his back. As Fang screeched in pain, Father saw the leaves fall away and his white, speckled intestines slither out of his belly, releasing a breath of foul hot air. Granddad laid him back down on the ground. ‘Elder brother,’ Fang pleaded, ‘put me out of my misery. . . . Don’t torture me. . . . Shoot me, please. . . .’
Granddad squatted down and held Fang Seven’s hand. ‘Little brother, I can carry you over to see Zhang Xinyi, Dr Zhang. He’ll patch you up.’
‘Elder brother . . . do it now. . . . Don’t make me suffer. . . . Past saving . . .’
Granddad squinted into the murky, late-afternoon August sky, in which a dozen or so stars shone brightly, and let out a long howl before turning to Father. ‘Are there bullets in your gun, Douguan?’
‘Yes.’
Father handed his pistol to Granddad, who released the safety catch, took another look into the darkening sky, and spun the cylinder. ‘Rest easy, brother. As long as Yu Zhan’ao has food to eat, your wife and child will never go hungry.’