Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

  We lay in our love nest, neck to neck, like a pair of swans frolicking on the water. Words cannot chronicle our mutual affection; our tender feelings were indescribable. We stood shoulder to shoulder at the edge of the river, gazing at our reflection. Lights flashed in our eyes, our lips swelled, our beauty came from love; we were a match made in heaven.

  As we stood there lost in love in the bosom of nature, a clamor rose behind us. Jerking our heads up out of our reveries, we saw a group of twenty or so people fanning in on us.

  Run, Huahua! — Don’t be afraid, Naonao. Look, it’s people we know.

  Huahua’s attitude turned my heart cold. Of course I knew who they were, I could see that right off. The crowd included my master, Lan Lian, his wife, Yingchun, and two of Lan Lian’s village friends, the brothers Fang Tianbao and Fang Tianyou (martial arts masters in a story by Mo Yan). My cast-off halter was cinched around Lan Lian’s waist; he was holding a long pole with a noose on the end, while Yingchun was carrying a lantern whose red paper shade was so badly singed the metal frame beneath it was exposed. One of the Fang brothers was carrying a rope in his hand, the other was dragging a club behind him. Others in the crowd included Han, the humpbacked stone mason, his half-brother, Han Qun, plus some men I’d seen before but whose names I didn’t know. They looked tired and dirty, which meant they’d been out looking all night.

  Run, Huahua! — I can’t, Naonao. — Then grab hold of my tail with your teeth, and I’ll pull you along. —Where can we run to, Naonao? They’ll catch up to us sooner or later, Huahua said meekly. Besides, they’ll probably go back for their rifles, and no matter how fast we run, we can’t outrun a bullet. Huahua, I replied, disappointed, you haven’t forgotten our vows already, have you? You swore to stay with me for all eternity, swore that we would be wild donkeys, to live in freedom, with no constraints, loving one another in nature’s bosom. She hung her head as tears welled up in her eyes. Naonao, she said, you’re a male donkey. You were relaxed after you pulled yourself out of me, not a care in the world. But now I’m carrying your offspring. I’m probably carrying twins, and my belly will soon be getting big. I’m going to need all the nutrition I can get; I want to be eating fried black beans, freshly milled bran, and crushed sorghum, all finely mashed and run three times through a sieve to make sure there are no stones or chicken feathers or sand. It’s already October, and the weather is turning cold. How am I going to eat as I drag my big belly around when the ground hardens, snow falls, the river freezes over, and the grass is covered with a blanket of snow? Or, for that matter, find water to drink? Then, when the babies are born, where will I sleep? Even if I force myself to stay with you on a sandy ridge, how will our babies stand the bitter cold? If they freeze to death in the snow and ice, their bodies lying out in the cold like logs or rocks, won’t you, their father, be heartbroken? Donkey fathers might be able to callously abandon their offspring, Naonao, but not their mothers. Or maybe some mothers can, but not your Huahua. Women can abandon their sons and daughter for their beliefs, but not donkeys. I ask you, Naonao, can you understand what a pregnant donkey feels?

  Under the assault of Huahua’s barrage of questions, I, Naonao, a male donkey, had no adequate comeback. Huahua, I said feebly, are you sure you’re pregnant?

  What a foolish question, Huahua said angrily. Six times in one night, Naonao, filling me with your seed. I’d be pregnant if I were a sawhorse, or a stone, or a log!

  Ahhh, I muttered, crestfallen, as I watched her obediently walk over to meet her mistress.

  Tears fell from my eyes, only to dry in the white heat of a name- less anger. I wanted to run, to bound away; I could not tolerate this sort of betrayal, however justified, and could not continue to live the humiliating life of a donkey in the Ximen estate. I turned and ran to the glittering surface of the river, my objective the tall sandy ridge, where the tamarisk grew in misty profusion, the pliant red branches serving as cover for red foxes, striped badgers, and sand grouses. So long, Huahua, go enjoy your life of splendor, I’ll not miss the warmth of my donkey lean-to, I must answer the call of the wild and seek my freedom. But I’d not even made it to the riverbank when I discovered that there were people lying in wait in the tamarisk, their heads camouflaged with leaves and twigs, their bodies cloaked in rush capes the color of dry grass; they were armed with muskets like the one that splattered the brains of Ximen Nao. Terror-stricken, I turned and headed east along the bank toward the early morning sun. The hair on my hide was painted flame-red; I was a galloping ball of fire, a donkey whose head was like a burning torch. Death did not scare me; I had faced ferocious wolves without a trace of fear, but the black holes of those muskets pointing at me terrified me, not the weapons themselves, but the horrible image of splattered brains they created. My master must have anticipated my path of escape, since he crossed the river up ahead, not even taking off his shoes and socks beforehand. Water flew in all directions as he lumbered through the river toward me. I changed direction, but not quickly enough to avoid the pole he swung, and the noose fell around my neck. But there was no quit in me, no easy defeat. Galling on all my strength, I raised my head and thrust out my chest, tightening the noose and making me fight for every breath. My master pulled on the pole with all his might and leaned backward until he was nearly parallel with the water. He dug in his heels; I dragged him along, his feet digging ruts in the sandbar like plows.

  In the end, as my strength waned and I could hardly breathe, I stopped running and was quickly surrounded, although the people held back, not daring to approach me. It was then that I was reminded of my reputation as a donkey prone to biting people. In the village, where life was peaceful and quiet, a donkey made news by causing injury with its teeth, and that news spread through the village like wildfire. But who among those men and women knew why I’d done that? Who could have guessed that the hole taken out of Ximen Bai’s head had resulted from a kiss by her reincarnated husband, who had forgotten he was now a donkey, not a man?

  Yingchun, displaying considerable courage, walked up to me with a handful of fresh green grass.

  “Little Blackie,” she muttered, “don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt you. Come home with me. . . .”

  When she was standing next to me, she rested her left hand on my neck and put the grass in her right hand up to my mouth, stroking me gently as she shielded my eyes with her bosom. The sensation of her soft, warm breasts was all the stimulation Ximen Nao’s memories needed to flood into my head, and tears spurted from my eyes. She whispered in my ear, and the hot breath of this hot-blooded woman made me lightheaded. My legs shook; I fell to my knees.

  “Little black donkey,” I heard her say, “my little black donkey, I know you’ve grown up and that you’re looking for a mate. A man thinks of marriage, a woman wants a mate, a donkey wants to sire its young. I don’t blame you for that, it’s perfectly normal. Well, you found your mate and you’ve planted your seed, so now you can come home with me. . . .”

  The other people quickly put my halter on and affixed the reins, adding a rusty-smelling chain, which they put in my mouth. Someone pulled the chain tight around my lower lip. The pain was so intense I had to flare my nostrils and gasp for air. But Yingchun reached out and hit the hand that was tightening the bit,

  “Let that go,” she said. “Can’t you see he’s injured?”

  They tried to get me to stand. That’s exactly what I wanted. Cows and sheep and pigs and dogs can lie down, but not donkeys, not unless they’re dying. I struggled to get to my feet, but my body weighed me down. Was I going to die at the tender age of three? For a donkey, that was not good news under any circumstances, but the idea of dying like this really got to me. There in front of me was a broad road, divided into many little paths, each leading to a scene worth viewing. Swept away by intense curiosity, I had to go on living. As I rose up on shaky legs, Lan Lian told the Fang brothers to stick their long club under my belly, one on each side, while he went around behind me to hold up my tail. With Yingch
un holding me around the neck, the Fang brothers gripped their ends of the pole and shouted, “Lift!” With their help, I stood up, still wobbly, my head drooping heavily. But I struggled to stay upright; I mustn’t fall down again. I did it, I was standing straight.

  The people walked around me, amazed and puzzled by the bloody injuries on my rear legs and my chest. How could the act of mating produce injuries like that? they wondered. I also heard members of the Han family discussing similar injuries on their female donkey. Is it possible, I heard the older Fang brother ask, that the two animals spent the whole night fighting one another? His brother shook his head. Impossible. A man who’d come to help the Han family retrieve his donkey downriver, pointed to something in the river, and yelled:

  “Come over here and tell me what this is!”

  One of the dead wolves was rolling slowly in the water; the other was pinned underwater by a rock.

  The crowd rushed over to see what he was pointing at, and I knew that it was wolf fur on top of the water and blood on the rocks — wolf blood and donkey blood — still filling the air around the spot with its stench. The signs of a fierce battle were obvious from prints on the rocks from wolf claws and donkey hooves and from the blood-streaked injuries to my and Huahua’s bodies.

  Two men rolled up their pant legs, took off their shoes and socks, and waded into the water to bring the two wolf carcasses up onto the bank. I sensed people turning to me with looks of respect, and I knew that Huahua was being honored by the same looks. Yingchun threw both arms around me and lovingly stroked my face; I felt moist pearls fall from her eyes onto my ears.

  “Damn you all!” Lan Lian said proudly. “The next person who says anything bad about my donkey will answer to me! Everyone says that donkeys are cowards, that they turn tail and run if they see a wolf. But not my donkey. He killed two ferocious wolves all by himself!”

  “Not by himself,” stonemason Han corrected him indignantly. “Our donkey deserves credit too.”

  “Yes, you’re right,” Lan Lian said with a smile. “She does. And she’s my donkey’s wife.”

  “With such severe injuries, I doubt that this marriage was ever consummated,” someone volunteered lightheartedly.

  Fang Tianbao bent down to examine my genitals, then ran over to check underneath the Han family’s female. He lifted up her tail and took a good look.

  “Yes, it was,” he announced authoritatively. “Take my word for it. You Hans are going to have a new donkey.”

  “Old Han, you’d better send a couple of pecks of black beans over to help our black donkey regain his strength,” Lan Lian said somberly.

  “Like hell!” was Han’s curt reply.

  By this time, the musket-armed men who had been hiding in the tamarisk bushes joined the others. Light on their feet, they moved furtively. Clearly, they were not farmers. Their leader was a squat man with piercing eyes. He walked up to the dead wolves and bent over to turn the head of one with the barrel of his weapon, after which he did the same to the abdomen of the other wolf. In a voice that betrayed surprise mixed with regret, he said:

  “This is the destructive pair we’ve been looking for!”

  One of his men, also armed with a musket, turned to the crowd and announced loudly:

  “That does it. We can go back and report to our superiors now”

  “I doubt that you people have seen these two,” one of the men said to Lan Lian and the others. “They’re not a pair of wild dogs, they’re gray wolves, the kind you seldom see out on the plains. They fled from Inner Mongolia and left a bloody trail. They were both tricky and vicious. In just over a month they killed a dozen or more head of livestock, including horses, cows, even a camel. We think people were next on their menu. If word had gotten out, the people would have panicked, so we organized six hunting teams in secret, searching and lying in wait for these two day and night. Now it’s over.” Another one, a man with an obvious sense of his own importance, kicked one of the carcasses: “You never thought this day would come, you bastard!” he cursed.

  The team leader took aim at the head of one of the wolves and fired. Flames from the barrel of his musket and the smoke that followed swallowed the animal up, its head now shattered, just like Ximen Nao’s, the rocks splattered with grays and reds.

  Another hunter took the hint and, with a smile, shot the other wolf in the abdomen. A fist-sized hole opened up in its belly, out of which a dirty mess of guts poured.

  Dumbfounded by what they’d just seen, Lan Lian and the others could only gape at one another. Once the smell of gunpowder had dissipated, the melodious sound of flowing water beguiled their ears; a flock of sparrows numbering in the hundreds came on the air, rising and falling like a dark cloud. They settled with a loud fluttering sound on tamarisk bushes, bending the pliant branches like fruit-laden trees. Waves of bird-talk enlivened the sandy ridges. To that was added the gossamer voice of Yingchun:

  “What was that for? Why shoot dead wolves?”

  “Is that your damned attempt to take credit for this?” Lan Lian thundered. “You didn’t kill those wolves, my donkey did.”

  The leader of the hunting team took two brand-new notes and tucked one under my reins, the other under Huahua’s.

  “Do you really think you can shut me up with money?” Lan Lian said, spitting mad. “That’s not going to happen!”

  “Take back your money,” Han the stonemason said. “Our donkeys killed those wolves, and we’re taking them with us.”

  The hunter smirked.

  “Good brothers,” he said, “with one eye open and the other shut, everyone wins. You could plead your case until your lips were chapped, and no one would believe that your donkeys were capable of doing that. Especially now that one’s head has been blown open and the other’s belly has a gaping bullet hole.”

  “Our donkeys were clawed and bitten bloody by those wolves,” Lan Lian shouted.

  “I agree, they have wounds all over their bodies, and no one could say they weren’t caused by wolves. And so . . .” The man smirked again. “Here’s what that proves: Two attacked your donkeys, causing bloody injuries, but at the moment of greatest danger, the three members of the Number Six hunting team arrived on the scene and, with no thoughts for their own safety, engaged the wolves in a life-or-death battle. The team leader, Qiao Feipeng, stood face-to-face with the male wolf, took aim, and fired, shattering its head. A second member of the team, Liu Yong, took aim at the second wolf and pulled the trigger. The gun misfired. After he’d spent a whole night hiding amid tamarisk bushes, his powder was wet. The wolf opened her mouth, which seemed to spread all the way to her ears, bared her gleaming white fangs, let loose a hideous, spine-tingling roar, and went straight for Liu Yong, who rolled out of the way of her first charge. But his heel caught between two rocks, and he lay faceup on the sandy ground. With a leap, her tail stretched out behind her, she charged again like a yellow blur. At that desperate moment, in less time than it takes to tell, Lü Xiaopo, the youngest member of the hunting team, took aim and fired at the animal’s head. But since it was a moving target, the shot hit her in the abdomen. When she fell, she rolled on the ground, spilling her guts all over the place, a terrifying sight. Though she was a vile predator, it was too terrible to see. By this time, Liu Yong had reloaded his musket and fired at the wolf, which was still rolling in agony. But because of the distance between them, the buckshot sprayed the area and peppered the dying animal in many spots. She stretched out her legs and died.”

  While Qiao was weaving his story, Liu Yong stepped backward, aimed, and fired buckshot into the wolf’s carcass, creating holes with burned edges.

  “So, what do you think?” Qiao asked, smiling proudly. “Whose story do you think people will believe, yours or mine?” He put more gunpowder into the barrel of his musket and said, “You outnumber us, but don’t even think of taking the wolves back with you. We hunters have an unwritten rule: Whenever there’s a dispute over a kill, the hunter with the most buckshot in
it keeps it. And there’s another rule. A hunter is within his rights to shoot anyone who walks off with his kill. It’s a matter of retaining his self-esteem.”

  “You’re fucking thugs!” Lan Lian said. “You’re going to be visited by nightmares after this. You’ll pay for taking what doesn’t belong to you.”

  The hunter just laughed. “Reincarnation and retribution are nonsense people use to trick old ladies. I don’t believe them for a minute. But maybe there’s something we can do together. If you’ll help us carry these carcasses to town on the backs of your donkeys, the county chief will reward you handsomely and I’ll give you each a bottle of the finest liquor.”

  I couldn’t take any more of that. Opening my mouth to bare my front teeth, I took aim at that flat head of his. But he was too fast for me. He moved his head away just in time, but I got him by the shoulder. Now you’ll see what a donkey can do, you thug! You people think that only felines or canines, with their sharp claws and teeth, know how to be predators, and that we donkeys, with our hooves, only know how to eat grass and husks of grain. You are all formalists, dogmatists, book worshippers, and empiricists. Well, today, I’m going to teach you that when he’s irritated, a donkey will bite!