Suddenly he felt a stabbing pain, and stumbled forward, twisting his body, dropping his shotgun to the ice. Something hot squirmed under his pants at the belt line. Running towards him were a dozen uniformed figures armed with rifles and glinting bayonets. Instinctively he yelled in fear, ‘Japan!’
The Japanese soldiers pounced on him and bayoneted him in the chest and abdomen. He screamed pitifully, like a fox howling for its mate. The blood from his wounds pitted the ice beneath him with its heat. He ripped off his tattered shirt with both hands. In his semiconscious state he saw the furry red fox emerge from the clump of reeds and circle round him once, then crouch down and gaze sympathetically. Its fur glowed brilliantly and its slightly slanted eyes shone like emeralds. After a while, Old Geng felt warm fur rubbing against his body, and he lay there waiting for the razor-sharp teeth to begin ripping him apart. If he were torn to shreds, he’d die with no complaints, for he knew that a man who betrays a trust is lower than an animal.
The fox began licking his wounds with its cold tongue.
Old Geng was adamant that the fox had repaid his betrayal by saving his life. Where else could you find another man who had sustained eighteen bayonet wounds yet lived to tell the tale? The fox’s tongue must have been coated with a miraculous substance since Old Geng’s wounds were instantly soothed, as though treated with peppermint oil – or so he said.
3
VILLAGERS WHO HAD gone to town to sell straw sandals announced upon their return: ‘Gaomi has been occupied by the Japanese. There’s a Rising Sun at the entrance!’
The panic-stricken villagers could only wait for the calamity they knew was coming. But not all of them suffered from racing hearts and crawling flesh: two among them went about their business totally unconcerned, never varying their routine. Who were they? One was Old Geng, the other a onetime musician who loved to sing Peking opera – Pocky Cheng.
‘What are you afraid of?’ Pocky Cheng asked everyone he met. ‘We’re still common folk, no matter who’s in charge. We don’t refuse to give the government its grain, and we always pay our taxes. We lie down when we’re told, and we kneel when they order us. So who’d dare punish us? Who, I ask you?’
His advice calmed many of the people, who began sleeping, eating, and working again. But it didn’t take long for the evil wind of Japanese savagery to blow their way: they fed human hearts to police dogs; they raped sixty-year-old women; they hung rows of human heads from electric poles in town. Even with the unflappable examples of Pocky Cheng and Old Geng, rumours of brutality were hard for the people to put aside, especially in their dreams.
Pocky Cheng walked around happy all the time. News that the Japanese were on their way to sack the village created a glut in dogshit in and around the village. Apparently the farmers who normally fought over it had grown lazy, for now it lay there waiting for him to come and claim it. He, too, walked out of the village as the roosters were crowing for the third time, running into Old Geng with his shotgun slung over his back. They greeted each other and parted ways. By the time the eastern sky had turned red, the pile of dogshit in Pocky Cheng’s basket was like a little mountain peak. He laid it down, stood on the southern edge of the village wall, and breathed in the cool, sweet morning air, until his throat itched. He cleared it loudly, then raised his voice to the rosy morning clouds and began to sing: ‘I am a thirsty grainstalk drinking up the morning dew –’
A shot rang out.
His battered, wingless felt hat sailed into the air. Tucking in his neck, he jumped into the ditch beneath the wall like a shot, bumping his head with a resounding thud against the frozen ground. Not sure if he was dead or alive, he tried moving his arms and legs. They were working, but barely. His crotch was all sticky. Fear raced through his heart. I’ve been hit, he thought. He sat up and stuck his hand down his pants. With his heart in his mouth, he pulled out his hand, expecting it to be all red. But it was covered with something yellow, and his nostrils twitched from the odour of rotten seedlings. He tried to rub the stuff off on the side of the ditch, but it stuck to his skin. He heard a shout from beyond the ditch: ‘Stand up!’
He looked up to see a man in his thirties with a flat, chiselled face, yellow skin, and a long, jutting chin. He was wearing a chestnut-coloured wool cap and brandishing a black pistol! A forest of yellow-clad legs was aligned behind him, the calves wrapped in wide, crisscrossed cloth leggings. His eyes travelled slowly upward past protruding hips, stopping at dozens of alien faces, all adorned with the smug smile of a man taking a comfortable shit. A Rising Sun flag drooped under the bright-red sunrise; onion-green rays glinted off a line of bayonets. Pocky Cheng’s stomach lurched, and his nervous guts relinquished their contents.
‘Get up here!’ Chestnut Wool Cap barked out angrily.
Pocky Cheng climbed out of the ditch. Not knowing what to say, he just bowed repeatedly.
Chestnut Wool Cap was twitching right under his nose. ‘Are there Nationalist troops in the village?’ he asked.
Pocky Cheng looked at him blankly.
A Japanese soldier waved a bloodstained bayonet in front of Pocky Cheng’s chest and face. He heard his stomach growl and felt his intestines writhe and twist slowly; at any other moment, he would have welcomed the intensely pleasant sensation of a bowel movement. The Japanese soldier shouted something and swung the bayonet, slicing Pocky Cheng’s padded jacket down the middle and freeing the cotton wadding inside. The sharp pain of parted skin and sliced muscles leaped from his rib cage. He doubled over, all the foul liquids in his body seeming to pour out at once.
He looked imploringly into the enraged Japanese face and began to wail.
Chestnut Wool Cap drove the barrel of his pistol into his forehead. ‘Stop blubbering! The commander asked you a question! What village is this? Is it Saltwater Gap?’
He nodded, trying hard to control his sobs.
‘Is there a man in the village who makes straw sandals?’ Chestnut Wool Cap softened his tone a little.
Ignoring his pain, he eagerly and ingratiatingly replied, ‘Yes yes yes.’
‘Did he take his straw sandals to market day in Gaomi yesterday?’
‘Yes yes yes,’ he jabbered. Warm blood had slithered down from his chest to his belly.
‘How about pickles?’
‘I don’t know . . . don’t think so. . . .’
Chestnut Wool Cap slapped him across the mouth and shouted: ‘Tell me! I want to know about pickles!’
‘Yes yes yes, your honour,’ he muttered obsequiously. ‘Commander, every family has pickles, you can find them in every pickle vat in the village.’
‘Stop acting like a fucking idiot. I want to know if there’s somebody called Pickles!’ Chestnut Wool Cap slapped him across the face, over and over.
‘Yes . . . no . . . yes . . . no . . . Your honour . . . don’t hit me . . . Please don’t hit me . . . your honour . . .’ he mumbled, reeling from the slaps.
The Japanese said something. Chestnut Wool Cap swept the hat off his head and bowed, then turned back, the smile on his face gone in an instant. He shoved Pocky Cheng and said with a scowl, ‘We want to see all the sandal makers in the village. You lead the way.’
Concerned about the dung basket he’d left on the wall, Pocky Cheng instinctively cocked his head in that direction. A bayonet that shone like snow flashed past his cheek. Quickly concluding that his life was worth more than a dung basket and spade, he turned his head back and set out for the village on his bandy legs. Dozens of Japs fell in behind him, their leather boots crunching across the frost-covered grass. A few grey dogs barked tentatively.
I’m really in a fix this time, Pocky Cheng was thinking. No one else went out to collect dogshit, no one but me, and I ran into some real dogshit luck. The fact that the Japanese didn’t appreciate his good-citizen attitude frustrated him. He led them quickly to each of the sandal makers’ cellars. Whoever Pickle was, he was sure in one now. Pocky Cheng looked off into the distance towards his house, where gr
een smoke curled into the sky from the solitary kitchen chimney. It was the most intense longing for home he’d ever known. As soon as he was finished he’d go there, change into clean pants, and have his wife rub some lime into the bayonet wound on his chest. The great woodwind player of Northeast Gaomi Township had never been in such a mess. Oh, how he longed for his lovely wife, who had grumbled about his pocked face at first, but, resigned at last, had decided that if you marry a chicken you share the coop; marry a dog and you share the kennel.
4
EARLY-MORNING GUNFIRE beyond the village startled Second Grandma out of a dream in which she was fighting Grandma tooth and nail. She sat up, her heart thumping wildly, and, try as she might, she couldn’t decide if the noise had just been part of the dream. The window was coated with pale morning sunlight; a grotesque pattern of frost had formed on the pane. Shuddering from the cold, she tilted her head so she could see her daughter, my aunt, who was lying beside her, snoring peacefully. The sweet, even breathing of the five-year-old girl soothed Second Grandma’s fears. Maybe it was only Old Geng shooting at wild game, a mountain lion or something, she consoled herself. She had no way of knowing how accurate her prediction was, nor could she have known that while she was sliding back under the covers the tips of Japanese bayonets were jabbing Old Geng’s ribs.
Little Auntie rolled over and nestled up against Second Grandma, who wrapped her arms around her until she could feel the little girl’s warm breath against her chest. Eight years had passed since Grandma had kicked her out of the house. During that time, Granddad had been tricked into going to the Jinan police station, where he nearly lost his life. But he managed to escape and make his way home, where Grandma had taken Father to live with Black Eye, the leader of the Iron Society.
When Granddad fought Black Eye to a standstill at the Salty Water River, he touched Grandma so deeply she followed him home, where they ran the distillery with renewed vitality. Granddad put his rifle away, bringing his bandit days to an end, and began life as a wealthy peasant, at least for the next few years. They were troubling years, thanks to the rivalry between Grandma and Second Grandma. In the end, they reached a ‘tripartite agreement’ in which Granddad would spend ten days with Grandma, then ten days with Second Grandma – ten days was the absolute limit. He stuck to his bargain, since neither woman was an economy lantern, someone to be taken lightly.
Second Grandma was enjoying the sweetness of her sorrows as she hugged Little Auntie. She was three months pregnant. A period of increased tenderness, pregnancy is a time of weakness during which women need attention and protection, and Second Grandma was no exception. Counting the days on her fingers, she longed for Granddad. He would be there tomorrow.
Another crisp gunshot sounded outside the village, and Second Grandma scrambled out of bed. She, too, had heard rumours that the Japanese would be coming to sack the village, and she was unable to drive away the dark premonition of impending doom. She’d willingly go home with Granddad, even if it meant putting up with Grandma’s abuse, for it couldn’t be worse than living in Saltwater Gap in constant dread. But Granddad had flatly refused, most likely, I believe, because by then he was cowed by the irreconcilable differences between the two women. He would come to regret this decision, for on the following morning he stood in a yard bathed by the warm rays of the late-October sun and gazed upon the tragic consequences of his mistake.
Little Auntie, awake by now, let out an affected yawn, her eyes shining like small bronze buttons; then she sighed, just as if she were a grown-up. That frightened Second Grandma, whose power of speech momentarily deserted her.
‘Help me get dressed, Mommy,’ Little Auntie said.
As Second Grandma picked up Little Auntie’s padded red jacket, she looked with unconcealed surprise at her daughter, who didn’t have to be coaxed out of bed for a change. There were wrinkles on her face, her eyebrows sagged, and her mouth was drooping – suddenly she looked like a little old woman. Poor Second Grandma’s heart constricted, and the red jacket felt as cold as ice. She called out Little Auntie’s pet name, her voice quivering like a frayed zither string: ‘Xiangguan . . . Xiangguan . . . wait a minute . . . till Mommy warms your jacket over the fire. . . .’
‘That’s okay, Mommy, you don’t have to warm it.’
Unable to hold back her tears, and not having the courage to look into her daughter’s face, she ran to the stove as though fleeing for her life, and lit a fire to warm the jacket, heavy in her hands. The straw crackled like gunfire and burned itself out as easily as it had caught fire, one stalk after another transformed into a cindery replica of its original shape.
Little Auntie’s loud breathing from the inner room brought her out of her daze. She carried the steaming jacket inside, where Little Auntie was sitting up in bed, the deep purple of the comforter contrasting sharply with her delicate white skin. Second Grandma draped the sleeves over Little Auntie’s slight shoulders as explosions rocked the village.
They seemed to be coming from beneath the ground: heavy, rumbling noises that shook the paper window-coverings and sent sparrows scurrying into the air, wings flapping. The sounds had barely died out when another barrage followed, and screams and shouts erupted in the village. Second Grandma picked up Little Auntie and hugged her tightly, mother and daughter trembling as one.
The shouts died out for a moment as a deathly still terror settled over the village, broken only by the dull tramping of feet and the occasional bark of a dog or the harsh crack of a rifle. Then, all of a sudden, the village erupted tumultuously, like a river that has broken through its dikes, producing a cacophony of women’s shrill cries, children’s tortured wails, chickens’ loud cackles as they flew up into trees and onto the village wall, and the braying of mules straining at their tethers.
Second Grandma bolted the front door and wedged two poles up against it, then climbed onto the kang and huddled up against the wall to await the coming disaster. She longed desperately for Granddad, but she hated him, too. When he came tomorrow, she’d have a good cry in front of him, then give him hell. The village was immersed in a hail of gunfire, and women’s screams came from all directions. Second Grandma knew only too well why they were screaming, for she had heard that the Japanese soldiers were like beasts who wouldn’t even spare seventy-year-old women.
The smell of smoke and fire seeped into the room; she heard the crackling of flames, punctuated by the occasional shouts of men. She grew numb with fear when she heard a pounding on her gate and frenzied gibberish. Little Auntie’s eyes widened for a moment, then she started to bawl, but Second Grandma clapped her hand over her mouth. The gate creaked and groaned. Second Grandma jumped down off the kang and ran to the stove, scooped out two handfuls of ashes, and smeared them over her face to make herself appear as ugly as possible. She did the same to Little Auntie’s face. The gate was about to splinter under the assault, and her eyelids fluttered wildly. Maybe they wouldn’t spare an old woman, but they’d surely let a pregnant woman go, wouldn’t they? Taking a bundle from the head of the bed, she undid her pants, stuffed it down the front, and retied her belt with a double knot. Little Auntie huddled against the wall, watching her mother’s strange behaviour.
The gate burst open, one of its broken panels crashing loudly to the ground. Shutting the bedroom door, Second Grandma jumped up onto the kang and wrapped her arms tightly around Little Auntie. The Japanese shouted as they battered down the front door with their rifle butts; flimsier than the gate, it splintered easily, and she heard the poles clatter to the floor. Now that the Japanese were inside, the last remaining obstacle was the paper-thin bedroom door. It was only a matter of whether or not they felt like breaking it down, whether or not they were driven by a desire to seize their prey.
Yet even then she trusted to luck; as long as the door was in place, the dangers would forever remain only in rumours and in her imagination, never becoming a reality. She stared with weak anxiety at the door panels as she heard the heavy footsteps of the
Japanese and their urgent conversations. The panels were painted a deep red, the frame was coated with grey dust, and the white wooden bolt was spotted with dark-red stains – the blood of a black-mouthed weasel. Second Grandma remembered how she’d beaten the animal with the wooden bolt and listened to its screeches as its head cracked open like a peanut shell; it rolled on the ground for a moment, its bushy tail swishing back and forth across the powdery snow, before going into convulsions and heaving one final shudder. How she had despised that potent weasel!
On an autumn day in 1931, just as night was falling, she went out to the sorghum field to dig up some bitter greens, and there, at the head of a weed-covered grave mound bathed in the blood-red rays of the setting sun, sat the weasel, its coat golden, its mouth as black as ink. She spotted it while she was squatting down relieving herself. It rested on its haunches, slowly twitching its paws at her, and she reacted as though she’d been struck by lightning: a powerful spasm shot up her back, like a leaping snake. She fell forward, screaming like a madwoman. By the time she’d come to her senses, the field was dark, and bright stars leaped through the black sky, restlessly, mysteriously. She felt her way out of the sorghum field, found the dirt path, and walked back to the village. The fanciful image of the weasel, its golden coat emitting a lustrous sheen like whiskers of grain, appeared and disappeared in front of her eyes, over and over, vivid and real. It was all she could do to contain the screams ready to rip from her throat; some did in fact get loose – she heard them. But they weren’t human screams, and she was shocked and frightened by their sound.
Second Grandma’s deranged state lasted a long time, leading her fellow villagers to conclude that she’d been possessed by the weasel. She was convinced that it had absolute control over her in some deep, dark place. Whatever it ordered her to do, she did: cry, laugh, speak in tongues, perform strange acts. Whenever the lightning bolt hit her in the middle of her back, it was as though she’d been split in two, and was struggling in a dark-red quagmire filled with the seductiveness of lust and death, sinking beneath the surface, then floating back to the top, only to sink once again. Spotting a rope with which she could pull herself out of the quagmire of lust, she grabbed it with both hands, but it too became part of the quagmire of desire, and she sank helplessly beneath the surface again. Always, the image of the potent, black-mouthed weasel swayed before her eyes, grinning hideously and whisking her vigorously with its tail; each time its tail brushed against her skin, a shout of uncontrollable excitement burst from her mouth. Finally, the exhausted weasel walked off, and Second Grandma crumpled to the ground, spittle drooling from the corners of her mouth, her body lathered in sweat, her face the colour of gold foil.