Red Sorghum
That massacre on the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival in 1939 decimated our village and turned hundreds of dogs into homeless strays. Drawn to the stench of human blood and gore, they were easy targets for Granddad and Father, who lay in wait at the bridgehead over the Black Water River. Granddad’s pistol barked loudly as it emitted puffs of scalding smoke, its barrel turning dark red under the autumn moon, which was as white and cold as frost. Father’s intense longing for Grandma during lulls in his pitched battle with the crazed, corpse-eating dogs makes me feel lost when I think of it, lost like a homeless stray.
In the aftermath of the slaughter of the townspeople, the sorghum field was covered by pristine moonlight, bleak, quiet, and still. Fires roared in the village, the tongues of flame frantically licking the low sky and snapping like flags in a strong wind. Only three hours earlier, Japanese soldiers and their Chinese puppet troops had cut a swath through the village and torched the houses before leaving through the northern gate. Now Granddad’s right arm, wounded a week before, was festering and oozing pus, hanging useless like a piece of dead meat. As Father helped him bandage the wound, Granddad threw his over-heated pistol onto the moist black earth of the sorghum field, where it sizzled. Once his wound was tended, he sat down and listened to the snorts and whinnies of Japanese warhorses and the whirlwind of pounding hooves galloping out of the village to form up ranks. The sounds were swallowed up by the field, along with the brays of pack mules and the footsteps of exhausted soldiers.
Father stood beside the seated figure of Granddad, and strained to get a fix on the hoofbeats of the horses. Earlier that afternoon, the Japanese cavalry, tormented by Granddad’s and Father’s sniper fire, had abandoned their assault on the village’s stubborn defences to rake through the sorghum field. Father had nearly died of fright when a huge, fiery-red beast bore down on him until all he could see was a hoof as big as a plate coming straight at his head, the arc of the horseshoe flashing like lightning. He screamed for his dad, then covered his head and hunkered down among the sorghum stalks. A muddle of foul-smelling sweat and urine splashed down as the horse passed over him, a stench he didn’t think he’d ever be able to wash off.
He remembered Grandma, seven days earlier, as she lay face up, with sorghum seeds and grains scattered over her face. Her pearly-white teeth shone between blood-drained lips, ornamented by the diamondlike grains.
The charging horse turned with difficulty and headed back, stalks of sorghum struggling bitterly against its rump, some bending and breaking, others snapping back into place. They shivered in the autumn winds like victims of malaria. Father saw the flared nostrils and fleshy lips of the panting warhorse; bloody froth sprayed from between its gleaming white teeth and dripped from its greedy lower lip. Clouds of white dust from the agitated sorghum stung its watery eyes. Seated atop the sleek warhorse was an awesome young Japanese cavalryman whose head, encased in a little square cap, barely cleared the tops of the stalks around him. The ears of grain whipped, pushed, and pricked him mercilessly, even mocked him. He squinted his eyes with loathing and repugnance for the stalks that were raising welts on his handsome face. Father watched him attack the sorghum ears with his sword, lopping some off so cleanly they fell silently, their headless stumps deathly still, while others protested noisily as they hung by threads.
Father saw the Japanese cavalryman rear his horse up and begin another charge, his sword raised high. He picked up his useless Browning pistol, which earlier had both sinned against him and distinguished itself in battle, and hurled it at the oncoming horse, striking it squarely on the forehead with a dull thud. The animal raised its head as its front legs buckled; its lips kissed the black earth, and its neck twisted to the side so it could pillow its head on the ground. The rider, thrown from the saddle, must have broken his arm in the fall, because Father saw the sword drop from his hand and heard a loud crack. A fragment of bone ripped through the sleeve of his uniform, and the limp arm began to twitch as though it had a will of its own. What was at first a clean wound showing nothing more than a gleaming white piece of bone, gruesome and deathlike, soon began to spurt fresh red blood, alternating between gushes and a slow ooze, droplets shining like so many strings of bright cherries. One of the cavalryman’s legs was pinned beneath the horse’s belly, the other was draped over its head, the two forming a large obtuse angle. Father never dreamed that a mighty warhorse and its rider could be brought down so easily.
Just then Granddad crept out from among the sorghum stalks and called out softly: ‘Douguan.’
Father got uneasily to his feet and looked at Granddad.
The Japanese cavalry troops were making another whirlwind pass from deep in the sorghum field, filling the air with a mixture of sounds, from the dull thud of hooves on the spongy black earth to the crisp snapping of sorghum stalks.
Granddad wrapped his arms around Father and pressed him to the ground as the horses’ broad chests and powerful hooves passed over them; groaning clods of dark earth flew in their wake, sorghum stalks swayed reluctantly behind them, and golden-red grains were scattered all over the ground, filling the deep prints of horseshoes in the soil.
The sorghum gradually stopped swaying in the wake of the cavalry charge, so Granddad stood up. Father didn’t realise how forcefully Granddad had pushed him to the ground until he noticed the deep imprints of his knees in the dark soil.
The Japanese cavalryman wasn’t dead. Shocked into consciousness by excruciating pain, he rested his good arm on the ground and awkwardly shifted the leg resting on the horse’s head back into a riding position. The slightest movement of the dislocated leg, which no longer seemed to belong to him, made him groan in agony. Father watched sweat drip from his forehead and run down his face through the grime of mud and gunpowder residue, exposing streaks of ghostly-pale skin. The horse hadn’t died, either. Its neck was writhing like a python, its eyes fixed on the sky and sun of the unfamiliar Northeast Gaomi Township. Its rider rested for a minute before straining to free his other leg.
Granddad walked up and yanked the leg free, then lifted him up by the scruff of his neck; his legs were so rubbery the entire weight of his body was supported by Granddad’s grip. As soon as Granddad let go, he crumpled to the ground like a clay doll dunked in water. Granddad picked up the glinting sword and swung it in two arcs – one down and one up – lopping off the heads of a couple of dozen sorghum stalks, whose dry stumps stood erect in the soil.
Then he stuck the point of the sword up under the man’s handsome, straight, pale nose and said in a controlled voice, ‘Where’s your arrogance now, you Jap bastard?’
The cavalryman’s shiny black eyes were blinking a mile a minute as a stream of gibberish poured from his mouth. Father knew he was pleading for his life as he reached into his shirt pocket with his trembling good hand and pulled out a clear plastic wallet, which he handed to Granddad as he muttered: ‘Jiligulu, minluwala . . .’
Father walked up to get a closer look at the plastic wallet, which held a colour photograph of a lovely young woman holding a pudgy infant in her milky-white arms. Peaceful smiles adorned their faces.
‘Is this your wife?’ Granddad asked him.
The man jabbered brokenly.
‘Is this your son?’ Granddad asked him.
Father stuck his head up so close he could see the woman’s sweet smile and the disarmingly innocent look of her child.
‘So you think this is all it takes to win me over, you bastard!’ Granddad tossed the wallet into the air, where it sailed like a butterfly in the sunlight before settling slowly, carrying the sun’s rays back with it. He jerked the sword out from under the man’s nose and swung it disdainfully at the falling object; the blade glinted coldly in the sunlight as the wallet twitched in the air and fell in two pieces at their feet.
Father was immersed in darkness as a cold shudder racked his body. Streaks of red and green flashed before his tightly shut eyes. Heartbroken, he couldn’t bear to open his eyes and see what he kn
ew were the dismembered figures of the lovely woman and her innocent baby.
The Japanese cavalryman dragged his pain-racked body over to Father, where he grabbed the two halves of the plastic wallet. Blood dripped from the tips of his yellow fingers. As he clumsily tried to fit the two halves of his wife and son together with his usable hand, his dry, chapped lips quivered, his teeth chattered, and broken fragments of words emerged: ‘Aya . . . wa . . . tu . . . lu . . . he . . . cha . . . hai . . . min . . .’
Two streaks of glistening tears carved a path down his gaunt, grimy cheeks. He held the photograph up to his lips and kissed it, a gurgling sound rising from his throat.
‘You goddamn bastard, so you can cry, too? Since you know all about kissing your wife and child, why go around murdering burs? You think that if you squeeze out a few drops of stinking piss I won’t kill you?’ Granddad screamed as he raised the glinting blade of the Japanese sword over his head.
‘Dad –’ Father screamed, grabbing Granddad’s arm with both hands. ‘Dad, don’t kill him!’
Granddad’s arm shook in Father’s grasp. With teary, pity-filled eyes, Father pleaded with Granddad, whose heart had been hardened so much that killing had become commonplace.
As Granddad lowered his head, the wind carried a barrage of earthshaking thuds from Japanese mortars and the crackle of machine-gun fire raking the ranks of village defenders. From deep in the sorghum field they heard the shrill whinnies of Japanese horses and the heavy pounding of their hooves on the dark soil. Granddad shook his arm violently, tossing Father aside.
‘You little shit, what the hell’s got into you?’ he lashed out. ‘Who are those tears for? For your mother? For Uncle Arhat? For Uncle Mute and all the others? Or maybe it’s for this no-good son of a bitch! Whose pistol brought him down? Wasn’t he trying to trample you and slice you in two with his sword? Dry your tears, son, then kill him with his own sword!’
Father backed up, tears streaming down his face.
‘Come here!’
‘No – Dad – I can’t –’
‘Fucking coward!’
Granddad kicked Father, took a step backward, and raised the sword over his head.
Father saw a glinting arc of steel, then darkness. A liquid ripping sound blotted out the thuds of Japanese mortars, pounding Father’s eardrums and tying his guts into knots. When his vision returned, the handsome young Japanese cavalryman lay on the ground sliced in half. The blade had entered his left shoulder and exited on the right, beneath his ribs. His multicoloured innards writhed and quivered, emitting a steamy, powerful stench. Father felt his own intestines twist and leap into his chest. A torrent of green liquid erupted from his mouth. He turned and ran.
Although Father didn’t have the nerve to look at the Japanese cavalryman’s staring eyes beneath those long lashes, he couldn’t escape the image of the body lying there sliced in two. With one stroke of the sword, Granddad seemed to have cut everything in two. Even himself. The grotesque illusion of a blood-soaked sword glinting in the sky suddenly flashed in front of Father’s eyes, slicing people in two, as if cleaving melons: Granddad, Grandma, Uncle Arhat, the Japanese cavalryman and his wife and child, Uncle Mute, Big Liu, the Fang brothers, Consumptive Four, Adjutant Ren, everyone.
Granddad threw the sword to the ground and took off after Father, who was running blindly through the sorghum. More Japanese cavalry troops bore down on them; mortar shells shrieked through the sky above the sorghum field and exploded among the men stubbornly defending their village with shotguns and homemade cannons.
Granddad caught up with Father, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, and shook him hard. ‘Douguan! Douguan! You little bastard! Have you gone crazy? What do you want, to crawl into a hole somewhere and die?’
Father clawed at Granddad’s powerful hands and shrieked, ‘Dad! Dad! Dad! Take me home. Take me home! I don’t want to fight any more. I don’t want to fight! I saw Mom! I saw Master! I saw Uncle!’
Granddad slapped him hard across the mouth. Father’s neck snapped to the side and went limp from the force of the blow. His head rolled against his chest; a bloody froth oozed from the corner of his mouth.
2
WHEN THE JAPANESE troops withdrew, the full moon, thin as a paper cutout, rose in the sky above the tips of the sorghum stalks, which had undergone such suffering. Grain fell sporadically like glistening tears. A sweet odour grew heavy in the air; the dark soil of the southern edge of our village had been thoroughly soaked by human blood. Lights from fires in the village curled like foxtails, as occasional pops, like the crackling of dry wood, momentarily filled the air with a charred odour that merged with the stifling stench of blood.
The wound on Granddad’s arm had turned worse, the scabs cracking and releasing a rotting, oozing mixture of dark blood and white pus. He told Father to squeeze the area around the wound. Fearfully, Father placed his icy fingers on the discoloured skin around the suppurating wound and squeezed, forcing out a string of air bubbles that released the putrid smell of pickled vegetables. Granddad picked up a piece of yellow spirit currency that had been weighted down by a clod of earth at the head of a nearby gravesite and told Father to smear some of the salty white powder from the sorghum stalks on it. Then he removed the head of a cartridge with his teeth and poured the greenish gunpowder onto the paper, mixed it with the white sorghum powder, and took a pinch with his fingers to daub on the open wound.
‘Dad,’ Father said, ‘shall I mix some soil into it?’
Granddad thought for a moment. ‘Sure, why not?’
Father bent down and picked up a clod of dark earth near the roots of a sorghum stalk, crumbled it in his fingers, and spread it on the paper. After Granddad mixed the three substances together and covered the wound with them, paper and all, Father wrapped a filthy strip of bandage cloth around it and tied it tight.
‘Does that make it feel better, Dad?’
Granddad moved his arm back and forth. ‘Much better, Douguan. An elixir like this will work on any wound, no matter how serious.’
‘Dad, if we’d had something like that for Mother, she wouldn’t have died, would she?’
‘No, she wouldn’t have. . . .’ Granddad’s face clouded.
‘Dad, wouldn’t it’ve been great if you’d told me about this before? Mother was bleeding so much I kept packing earth on the wounds, but that only stopped it for a while. If I’d known to add some white sorghum powder and gunpowder, everything would have been fine. . . .’
All the while Father was rambling, Granddad was loading his pistol. Japanese mortar fire raised puffs of hot yellow smoke all up and down the village wall.
Since Father’s Browning pistol lay under the belly of the fallen horse, during the final battle of the afternoon he used a Japanese rifle nearly as tall as he was; Granddad used his German automatic, firing it so rapidly it spent its youth and was ready for the trash heap. Although battle fires still lit up the sky above the village, an aura of peace and quiet had settled over the sorghum fields.
Father followed Granddad, dragging his rifle behind him as they circled the site of the massacre. The blood-soaked earth had the consistency of liquid clay under the weight of their footsteps; bodies of the dead merged with the wreckage of sorghum stalks. Moonlight danced on pools of blood, and hideous scenes of dismemberment swept away the final moments of Father’s youth. Tortured moans emerged from the field of sorghum, and here and there among the bodies some movement appeared. Father was burning to ask Granddad to save those fellow villagers who were still alive, but when he saw the pale, expressionless look on his father’s bronze face, the words stuck in his throat.
During the most critical moments, Father was always slightly more alert than Granddad, perhaps because he concentrated on surface phenomena; superficial thought seems ideally suited to guerrilla fighting. At that moment, Granddad looked benumbed; his thoughts were riveted on a single point, which might have been a twisted face, or a shattered rifle, or a single spent bullet. H
e was blind to all other sights, deaf to all other sounds. This problem – or characteristic – of his would grow more pronounced over the coming decade. He returned to China from the mountains of Hokkaido with an unfathomable depth in his eyes, gazing at things as though he could will them to combust spontaneously.
Father never achieved this degree of philosophical depth. In 1957, after untold hardships, when he finally emerged from the burrow Mother had dug for him, his eyes had the same look as in his youth: lively, perplexed, capricious. He never did figure out the relationship between men and politics or society or war, even though he had been spun so violently on the wheel of battle. He was forever trying to squeeze the light of his nature through the chinks in his body armour.
Granddad and Father circled the site of the massacre a dozen times, until Father said tearfully, ‘Dad . . . I can’t walk any more. . . .’
Granddad’s robot movements stopped; taking Father’s hand, he backed up ten paces and sat down on a patch of solid, dry earth. The cheerless and lonely sorghum field was highlighted by the crackle of fires in the village. Weak golden flames danced fitfully beneath the silvery moonlight. After sitting there for a moment, Granddad fell backward like a capsized wall, and Father laid his head on Granddad’s belly, where he fell into a hazy sleep. He could feel Granddad’s feverish hand stroking his head, which sent his thoughts back nearly a dozen years, to when he was suckling at Grandma’s breast.
He was four at the time, and growing tired of the yellowed nipple that was always thrust into his mouth. Having begun to hate its sour hardness, he gazed up into the look of rapture in Grandma’s face with a murderous glint in his eyes and bit down as hard as he could. He felt the contraction in Grandma’s breast as her body jerked backward. Trickles of a sweet liquid warmed the corners of his mouth, until Grandma gave him a swat on the bottom and pushed him away. He fell to the ground, his eyes on the drops of fresh red blood dripping from the tip of Grandma’s pendulous breast. He whimpered, but his eyes were dry. Grandma, on the other hand, was crying bitterly, her shoulders heaving, her face bathed in tears. She lashed out at him, calling him a wolf cub, as mean as his wolf of a father.