Another shot rang out behind them.
Granddad heaved a long sigh. Father turned and saw a little black hole in Black Eye’s temple.
As night fell, the Leng detachment surrounded the Jiao-Gao and Iron Society soldiers, who had waged a desperate fight from the midst of Grandma’s funeral procession. Their ammunition exhausted, the two detachments were huddled together, clenching their teeth and staring with bloodshot eyes at the relentlessly advancing Leng detachment, recently fortified by a squad from the Seventh Army. The setting sun lit up the evening clouds and dyed the groaning black earth. Scattered across it were countless sons and daughters of Northeast Gaomi who had grown to adulthood on bright-red sorghum, and whose blood now formed streams that converged into a river. Scavenger birds were drawn to the spot by the smell of blood. Most were circling above the horses – like greedy children, they wanted the biggest pieces first.
Grandma’s coffin was pitted with pale bullet holes, having served as cover during the gunfight. The roasted chickens, ducks, pigs, and sheep from the roadside shrines had provided sustenance to the Jiao-Gao soldiers, several of whom now launched a bayonet charge but were mowed down by Leng bullets.
‘Hands up! Surrender!’ the heavily armed Leng troops yelled.
Granddad looked over at Little Foot Jiang, who returned his gaze. Neither said a word as they raised their hands.
The white-gloved commander of the Leng detachment strode out from his bodyguard and said with a sneer, ‘Commander Yu, Commander Jiang. Enemies and lovers are destined to meet. Now what do you have to say?’
‘I’m ashamed!’ Granddad said sadly.
‘I’m going to report you for the monstrous crime of disrupting the war against Japan on the Eastern Jiao battlefront!’ Commander Jiang said.
Pocky Leng lashed him with his whip. ‘Your bones may be soft, but your mouth is plenty hard! Take them into the village!’ he ordered with a wave of the hand.
The Leng detachment bivouacked in our village that night, after putting their Jiao-Gao and Iron Society prisoners in a shed, where they were guarded by a dozen soldiers armed with submachine guns. The moans of the wounded and the weeping of young soldiers who longed for their mothers, wives, and lovers didn’t let up all night long.
Like an injured bird, Father snuggled up in Granddad’s arms, where he could hear the beating of Granddad’s heart, fast one moment, slow the next, like the music of tinkling bells. He fell into a sound sleep, and dreamed of a woman who resembled both Grandma and Beauty. She stroked his injured pecker with hot fingers, sending bolts of lightning up his backbone. He woke with a start, feeling a sense of loss. The plaintive wails of the wounded floated over from the fields. He didn’t dare tell Granddad of his dream. As he sat up slowly, he could see the Milky Way through a hole in the shed roof. Suddenly it hit him: I’m almost sixteen!
At daybreak, the Leng detachment pulled down several tents, from which they removed thick ropes. After tying up their prisoners in groups of five, they dragged them over to the willow trees beside the inlet where the Iron Society had tethered its horses the night before. Little Foot Jiang, Granddad, and Father were tied to the tree nearest the bank. Big Tooth Yu’s grave mound lay beneath a solitary tree alongside the inlet. The white water lilies had risen with the water level, their new leaves floating on the surface. Cracks appeared in the dense layer of duckweed to reveal ribbons of green water disturbed by swimming frogs. On the other side of the bare village wall, Father saw yesterday’s scars on today’s fields; the massacred fragments of the funeral procession lay on the road like a gigantic python. Several Leng-detachment soldiers were chopping up the bodies of dead horses, the stench of dark-red blood permeating the chilly air.
Hearing a sigh from Little Foot Jiang, Father spun his head around and watched as the two commanders exchanged looks of misery, four listless eyes beneath lids heavy with exhaustion. The wound on Granddad’s shoulder had begun to fester, and the putrid smell drew red horseflies that had been feasting on the decaying corpses of donkeys and men; the bandage on Little Foot Jiang’s foot had unravelled and was hanging around his ankle like a strip of sausage casing. Trickles of black blood oozed from the spot where Granddad had shot him.
It seemed to Father that both Granddad and Little Foot Jiang were trying to say something, but not a word was spoken. He sighed and turned to gaze out over the broad black plain, shrouded in a milky-white mist.
More than eighty soldiers from the Jiao-Gao regiment and the Iron Society were tied to trees. One of Granddad’s men was sobbing, and the Jiao-Gao soldier next to him nudged him with his shoulder: ‘Don’t cry, Brother-in-Law. Sooner or later we’ll get our revenge against Zhang Zhuxi!’
The old Iron Society soldier wiped his filthy face on his filthy clothes. ‘I’m not crying over your sister! She’s dead, and all the tears in the world won’t bring her back. I’m crying for us. You and I are kin from neighbouring villages who saw each other every time we looked up, so how did things turn out like this? I’m crying for your nephew, my son, Silver Ingot. He was only eighteen when he followed me into the Iron Society so he could avenge your sister. But before he tasted revenge your men killed him. He was on his knees, but you bayoneted him anyway! You mean, cold-blooded bastards! Don’t you have sons of your own?’
The old Iron Society soldier’s tears were burned dry by flames of anger. He roared at the ragged Jiao-Gao soldiers, ‘Swine! You should have been out there fighting the Japanese. Or their yellow puppets! Why did you turn your weapons on the Iron Society! You lousy traitors! You foreign lackeys . . .’
‘Don’t go too far, Brother-in-Law,’ the Jiao-Gao soldier cautioned.
‘Who are you calling Brother-in-Law? Did you remember you had a brother-in-law when you were throwing your damned grenades at your own nephew?’
‘All you see is one side, old man!’ yelled one of the Jiao-Gao officers. ‘If your Iron Society hadn’t kidnapped Little Foot Jiang and demanded a ransom of a hundred rifles, we’d have had no reason to fight you. We needed the weapons to attack the Japanese, to give us a chance on the battlefield, to propel us into the vanguard of the resistance!’
Father, whose voice was changing, felt compelled to enter the fray: ‘You started it by stealing the guns we’d hidden in the well,’ he said in a raspy squeak. ‘We kidnapped him because you stole the dog pelts we’d hung on the walls to dry!’
He coughed up a gob of phlegm angrily and tried to spit it in the face of the Jiao-Gao officer, but it missed its mark and landed on the forehead of a tall, slightly hunchbacked Iron Society soldier, who lashed out as though he’d been shot: ‘Douguan, fuck your living mother!’
The prisoners laughed, even though their aching arms were turning numb from the ropes and their future was clouded.
But Granddad just sneered and said, ‘What the hell are you arguing about? We’re all a bunch of whipped soldiers.’
While the sound of Granddad’s words still hung in the air, Little Foot Jiang, his face the colour of ashes, fell to the ground. Blood and pus oozed from his injured foot, which had swollen to the size of a winter melon. The Jiao-Gao soldiers, held back by the ropes around them, could only look helplessly at their unconscious commander.
Just then the dapper Detachment Leader Leng strode out of his tent to join his men in inspecting the hundreds of rifles and two cases of wooden-handled grenades they’d captured from the Iron Society and the Jiao-Gao regiment. Twirling his whip, he walked smugly towards the prisoners. Father heard the sound of heavy breathing behind him, and he could picture the angry look on Granddad’s face. The corners of Detachment Leader Leng’s mouth curled upward, and the fine wrinkles about his cheeks wriggled like little snakes.
‘Have you thought about what I’m going to do with you, Commander Yu?’ he asked with a giggle.
‘That’s up to you!’ Granddad replied.
‘It would be a waste of a good man to kill him. But if I don’t, you might kidnap me again someday!’
‘K
illing me won’t close my eyes!’
With a swift kick, Father sent a road apple flying into Detachment Leader Leng’s chest.
Leng raised his whip, then let it drop. ‘I hear this little bastard only has one nut. Somebody come over here and cut off the other one! That’ll keep him from biting and kicking!’
‘He’s just a boy, Old Leng,’ Granddad said. ‘Whatever you want to do you can do to me.’
‘Just a boy? The little bastard’s got more fight in him than a wolf cub!’
Little Foot Jiang, who had regained consciousness, struggled to his feet.
‘Commander Jiang,’ Detachment Leader Leng said, ‘what do you think I should do with you?’
‘Killing me will only bring you trouble, Detachment Leader Leng,’ Commander Jiang said with bold assurance, but with his face bathed in cold sweat. ‘The day will come when the people liquidate you for your monstrous crime of slaughtering noble fighters of the anti-Japanese resistance!’
‘You can pass the time here until I’ve had something to eat. I’ll deal with you then.’
The Leng soldiers sat around eating horsemeat and drinking sorghum wine.
Suddenly the sentry on the northern wall of the village fired a shot and ran into the village. ‘The Japs are coming – the Japs are coming!’
Detachment Leader Leng grabbed the sentry’s sleeve and asked angrily, ‘How many Japs? Are they real Japs or lackeys?’
‘I think they’re lackeys. Their uniforms are yellow. A whole line of yellow, running towards the village at a crouch.’
‘Lackeys? Kill the sons of bitches. Company Commander Qi, take your men up to the wall, and hurry!’ he ordered.
Then he turned to two guards with machine guns. ‘Keep an eye on them,’ he commanded. ‘Pop ’em if they act up!’ Surrounded by his bodyguards, he ran at a crouch towards the northern edge of the village.
Less than a quarter of an hour later, fighting broke out. The opening salvos of rifle fire were followed by machine-gun fire, and before long the air was filled with the shrieks of incoming projectiles that exploded in the village, sending shrapnel slamming into the village wall and the trunks of trees. Amid the din of shouting came the jiligulu of a foreign tongue.
It was real Japs after all, not lackeys. Detachment Leader Leng and his troops put up a stubborn defence, but abandoned their positions after half an hour of fighting and fell back to the cover of toppled walls.
Japanese artillery shells were already falling into the inlet. The anxious Jiao-Gao and Iron Society soldiers stomped their feet and ducked their heads. ‘Untie us!’ they bellowed angrily. ‘Fuck your living mothers! Untie us! If you came out of Chinese pricks, untie us. If you came out of Japanese pricks, then kill us!’
The guards ran to the stack of rifles and picked up two swords, with which they cut their prisoners’ ropes.
Eighty soldiers ran like madmen to the stack of rifles and the pile of hand grenades; then, ignoring the numbness of their arms and the hunger in their bellies, they charged the Japanese, yelling wildly as they ran straight into a hail of lead.
Several dozen columns of smoke rose from the village wall following the explosions of the first salvo of hand grenades thrown by the Jiao-Gao and Iron Society soldiers.
FIVE
Strange Death
1
FULL PURPLE LIPS, like ripe grapes, gave Second Grandma – Passion – her extraordinary appeal. The sands of time had long since interred her origins and background. Her rich, youthful, resilient flesh, her plump bean-pod face, and her deep-blue, seemingly deathless eyes were buried in the wet yellow earth, extinguishing for all time her angry, defiant gaze, which challenged the world of filth, adored the world of beauty, and brimmed over with an intense consciousness. Second Grandma had been buried in the black earth of her hometown. Her body was enclosed in a coffin of thin willow covered with an uneven coat of reddish-brown varnish that failed to camouflage its wormy, beetle-holed surface. The sight of her blackened, blood-shiny corpse being swallowed up by golden earth is etched forever on the screen of my mind.
In the warm red rays of the sun, I saw a mound in the shape of a human figure rising atop the heavy, deeply remorseful sandbar. Second Grandma’s shapely figure; Second Grandma’s high-arching breasts; tiny grains of shifting sand on Second Grandma’s furrowed brow; Second Grandma’s sensual lips protruding through the golden-yellow sand . . . I knew it was an illusion, that Second Grandma was buried beneath the black earth of her hometown, and that only red sorghum grew around her gravesite.
Standing at the head of her grave – as long as it isn’t during the winter, when the plants are dead and frozen, or on a spring day, when cool southerly breezes blow – you can’t even see the horizon for the nightmarishly dense screen of Northeast Gaomi sorghum. Then you raise your gaunt face, like a sunflower, and through the gaps in the sorghum you can see the stunning brilliance of the sun hanging in the kingdom of heaven. Amid the perennially mournful sobs of the Black Water River you listen for a lost soul drifting down from that kingdom.
2
THE SKY WAS a beautiful clear blue. The sun hadn’t yet made an appearance, but the chaotic horizon on that early-winter morning was infused with a blinding red light when Old Geng shot at a red fox with a fiery torch of a tail. Old Geng had no peers among hunters in Saltwater Gap, where he bagged wild geese, hares, wild ducks, weasels, foxes, and, when there was nothing else around, sparrows. In the late autumn and early winter, enormous flocks of sparrows flew over Northeast Gaomi Township, a shifting brown cloud that rolled and tumbled above the boundless land. At dusk they returned to the village, where they settled on willows whose naked, yellowing limbs drooped earthward or arched skyward. As the dying red rays of the evening sun burned through the clouds, the branches lit up with sparrows’ black eyes shining like thousands of golden sparks. Old Geng picked up his shotgun, squinted, and pulled the trigger. Two sparrows crashed to the ground like hailstones as shotgun pellets tore noisily through the branches. Uninjured sparrows saw their comrades hit the ground and flapped their wings, rising into the air like shrapnel sent flying high into a lethargic sky.
Father had eaten some of Old Geng’s sparrows when he was young. They were delicious. Three decades later, my older brother and I went into the sorghum field and engaged some crafty sparrows in a heated battle. Old Geng, who was already over seventy by then and lived alone as a pensioner, was one of our most revered villagers. Asked to speak at meetings to air grievances against the old order, he invariably stripped to the waist onstage to show his scars. ‘The Japs bayoneted me eighteen times,’ he’d say, ‘until you couldn’t see my skin for all the blood. But I didn’t die, and you know why? Because I was protected by a fox fairy. I don’t know how long I lay there, but when I opened my eyes all I could see was a bright-red light. The fox fairy was licking my wounds.’
In his home, Old Geng – Eighteen Stabs Geng – kept a fox-fairy memorial tablet, which some Red Guards decided to smash during the Cultural Revolution. They changed their minds and got out of there fast when they saw him kneel in front of the tablet wielding a cleaver.
Old Geng drew a bead on the red fox, knowing exactly which way it would run; but he was reluctant to shoot. He knew he could sell the beautiful, bushy pelt for a good price. If he was going to shoot, it had to be now. The fox had already enjoyed a full life, sneaking over nightly to steal a chicken. No matter how strong the villagers made their chicken coops, the fox always found a way inside and no matter how many traps they set, it always got away. That year the villagers’ chicken coops seemed built solely to store its food.
Old Geng had walked out of the village as the roosters were crowing for the third time and gone straight to a low embankment alongside the swamp in front of the village, where he waited for the chicken thief to show up. Dried-up marsh weeds stood waist-high in the swamp, where a thin sheet of nearly transparent ice, possibly thick enough to bear a man’s weight, covered the stagnant water that had accumulated
during the autumn rains. Yellow tassels atop imprisoned reeds shivered in the freezing morning air, as powerful rays of light from far off in the eastern sky gradually illuminated the icy surface, which gave off a moist radiance, like the scales of a carp. Then the eastern sky turned bright, staining the ice and reeds the colour of mottled blood. Old Geng picked up the odour and saw a tight cluster of reeds part slowly like an undulating wave, then close up quickly. He stuck his nearly frozen index finger into his mouth and breathed on it, then wrapped it around the frost-covered trigger.
The fox bounded out of the clump of reeds and stood on the ice, turning it a bright red, as though it had gone up in flames. Congealed blood covered its pointy little snout; a chicken feather the colour of hemp was stuck in its whiskers. It walked with stately grace across the ice. Old Geng cried out, and it froze on the spot, squinting to get a good look at the embankment. Old Geng shivered, closed his eyes, and fired.
Like a little fireball, the fox rolled into the reeds. Old Geng, his shoulder numb from the recoil, stood up under a silvery sky, looking bigger and taller than usual. He knew the fox was hiding amid the reeds and staring at him with loathing. Something suspiciously like a guilty conscience began to stir in Old Geng. He thought back over the past year and the trust the fox had shown in him: it always knew he was hiding behind the embankment, yet it sauntered across the ice as though putting his conscience to the test. And Old Geng had always passed the test. But now he had betrayed this friendship, and he hung his head, gazing into the clump of reeds that had swallowed the fox, not even turning back to look when he heard the clatter of footsteps behind him.