“You don’t have to tell me,” the section chief said, running out of patience. “But a medical expert from the county will be here soon, and he’s bringing attack dogs with him. Tell me now, and that will count as a voluntary confession.”
“I didn’t kill her,” he said one more time, sleepily, “and I didn’t rape her.”
The section chief took out a pack of cigarettes, crushed it, and tossed it into the water. As he rubbed the sleep from his eyes, he said to the recorder, “Go to the farm headquarters building, Sun, and place a call to the County Security Bureau. Tell them to get over here as soon as possible.” He sniffed the air. “The body’s starting to stink, and if they don’t come soon, our investigation will be ruined.”
“Boss,” the man said, “are you crazy? I tried calling the day before yesterday and couldn’t get through. The rain has washed away telephone poles.”
“Shit!” the section chief cursed as he jumped down off of his chair, put on his rain cap, and waded over to the door, where he stuck out his head to look around. A roaring curtain of water drenched his shiny back as he ran over to the site of Jintong and Commander Long’s illicit liaison. Out in the yard, clean and dirty water merged, with dead chickens floating on the surface. The few surviving hens were perched atop the wall — heads tucked down, clucking piteously. Jintong had a splitting headache and his teeth were chattering. His mind was a blank, except for the movements of Commander Long’s nakedness. After impulsively entering her dying body, he had experienced terrible remorse, but now all he felt toward her was loathing and disgust. He struggled to break free of her likeness, but, as with Natasha years before, it stuck doggedly in his mind. The difference was that Natasha was a beautiful young image, while Commander Long was a repulsive, demonic one. At the moment he was dragged out to be interrogated, he made up his mind not to reveal the ugly details of what had happened. I didn’t rape her, and I didn’t kill her. She tried to force herself on me, and when I resisted, she killed herself. That’s all he would reveal under the pressures of the relentless questioning.
The security chief returned and shook the water off of his neck. “Damn!” he exclaimed. “She’s all bloated. Like a debristled hog. Disgusting.” He pinched his throat.
Off in the distance, the cafeteria’s red-brick chimney came crashing to the ground, still belching black smoke, and took the building itself — roof, windows, Venetian blinds, and all — with it, sending gray water towering into the air with a roar.
“The building’s down,” the security chief exclaimed. “Now what? Forget the fucking interrogation — now we won’t even be able to eat!”
The collapse of the cafeteria opened up an unobstructed view of the fields. It also created the terrifying sight of an ocean of water, all the way to the horizon. The dikes of the Flood Dragon River poked through the surface here and there, but the water within them rose above the level beyond. The rain fell unevenly to earth, as if dumped by a gigantic watering can moving rapidly across the sky. Directly below the watering can the downpour set up a roar, with torrents of water creating a mist over the land; everywhere else, sunlight lit up the gentle flow of floodwaters. Situated in the lowest spot of the Northeast Gaomi marshy lowland, the Flood Dragon River Farm was irrigated by water from three separate counties. Soon after the cafeteria collapsed, every farm structure, from those with rammed-earth walls to tile-roofed buildings, crumbled into the rushing water, except for the grain storage building, which had been planned and constructed by a rightist named Liang Badong. A few sections of the chicken coop, built with bricks from the graveyard, managed to remain upright, but the water had already reached the windows. Benches and stools floated on the water, which was up to Jintong’s navel as he too began to float in his chair.
Cries of distress sounded everywhere, as people struggled against the flood. “Head for the river dikes!” someone shouted.
The security section recorder kicked out the window and fled, followed by the curses of the section chief. He turned to Jintong. “Follow me,” he said.
So Jintong followed the squat section chief out into the yard, where the man had to move his arms back and forth in the water to keep standing. Jintong looked behind him and spotted a clutch of chickens perched on the roof, alongside the wicked fox. Long Qingping’s corpse floated out of the room and followed him. When he sped up, so did the corpse, and when he made a turn, the corpse followed suit. Long Qingping’s corpse nearly made him soil himself out of fright. Finally, her tangle of hair was caught in the wire fence around the war relics, and Jintong was free of her. The artillery barrels poked out of the muddy water; of the tanks, only the turrets and guns showed above the surface, like enormous turtles sticking their necks out of the water. When the two men drew up to the tractor unit, the chicken farm collapsed.
In the tractor unit garage, people had crowded onto a pair of red Russian combines, and more were trying to climb aboard; by doing so, they sent others sliding down into the water.
A surge of water washed away the security section chief, gaining for Jintong his freedom. He and several rightists headed, hand in hand, toward the Flood Dragon River under the leadership of the high-jumper Wang Meizan, with the civil engineer Liang Badong bringing up the rear. Huo Lina, Ji Qiongzhi, Qiao Qisha, and others he didn’t know walked between the two men, joined by Jintong, who half walked and half swam into their midst. Qiao Qisha reached out to him. The women’s wet blouses stuck to their bodies, almost as if they were naked. By force of habit, however disgusting, he cast fleeting glances at the chests of Huo Lina, Ji Qiongzhi, and Qiao Qisha. They carried Jintong back to the dreamland of his youth, and drove Long Qingping’s image out of his head. He felt himself turning into a butterfly crawling out of Long’s blackened corpse to dry his wings in the sun and flit among a garden of breasts that emitted a strange redolence.
Jintong found himself wishing he could trudge through this water forever, but the Flood Dragon River dike dashed his hopes. Farm workers huddled atop the dike were hugging their shoulders as the floodwaters flowed slowly down the trough and sent a soft mist into the air. There were no swallows, there were no gulls. Off to the southwest, Dalan was shrouded in the whiteness of rain; everywhere they looked they saw the chaos of water.
When the red-tiled grain storage shed finally fell, the Flood Dragon River Farm became nothing but a gigantic lake. Sounds of weeping rose from the dike — leftists were crying, and so were rightists. Director Li Du, a man they seldom saw, was shaking his gray head — Lu Liren’s head, that is — and shouting shrilly, “Don’t cry, comrades. Be strong. As long as we remain united, we can overcome any difficulty …” All of a sudden, he clutched his chest and began to crumple. The head of the management section tried to catch him, but he fell onto the muddy ground in a heap. “Is there a doctor here? Anyone with medical knowledge, come, quickly!” the man bellowed.
Qiao Qisha and a male rightist ran up. They checked the victim’s pulse and raised his lids to look at his eyes. Then they pinched the trough under his nose and the spot between his thumb and index finger, but that did no good. “He’s gone,” the man said matter-of-factly. “Heart attack.”
Ma Ruilian opened her mouth and released wails from Shangguan Pandi’s throat.
As night fell, the people huddled to stay warm. An airplane with flashing green lights appeared in the sky, rekindling hope below. But it flew past, like a comet, and never returned. At some time in the middle of the night, the rain stopped, and hordes of frogs croaked an earsplitting chorus. A few stars twinkled tentatively in the sky, looking as if they were about to fall to earth. During a brief respite from the croaking frogs, the wind whistled through tree branches floating past us. Out of nowhere, someone dove into the water and immediately turned belly-up, like a large fish. No one screamed for help; no one even seemed to notice. Before long, someone else jumped in, and this time, the reaction on the dike was, if anything, even more callous.
Starlight shone down on Qiao Qisha and Huo Lina as
they walked up to Jintong. “I want to tell you about my background in a roundabout fashion,” Qiao Qisha said. She then turned to Huo Lina and spoke to her in Russian for several minutes. Huo Lina matter-of-factly interpreted for her. “When I was four, I was sold to a White Russian woman. No one could tell me why this woman wanted to buy a Chinese girl.” Qiao Qisha continued in Russian, with Huo Lina interpreting. “One day the Russian woman died of alcohol poisoning and I was left to roam the streets, until I was taken in by a railroad station manager. He and his family treated me like their own daughter. Since they were well-off, they paid for me to go to school. After Liberation, in 1949,1 was admitted to a medical school. But then, during the great airing of views, I said that there are bad poor people, just as there are good rich people, and I was labeled a rightist. I believe I am your seventh sister.”
Qisha shook Huo Lina’s hand to thank her. Then she took Jintong by the hand and led him to one side, where she said softly, “I’ve heard things about you. I studied medicine. Your teacher told me that you had sex with the woman before she killed herself. Is that right?” “It was after she did it,” Jintong said haltingly. “That’s despicable,” she said. “The security section chief was a fool. This flood saved your life. You know that, don’t you?” Jintong nodded. “I saw her corpse float away, and so they have no evidence against you,” the woman claiming to be my seventh sister said in a flat voice. “Be firm. Deny ever having sex with her — if we manage to survive the flood, that is.”
Qiao Qisha’s prediction came true. The flood had come to Jintong’s aid. By the time the chief investigator of the County Security Bureau and a medical examiner arrived in a rubber raft, half the people lay unconscious on the Flood Dragon River dike, while the remainder had survived by eating rotting grass they’d fished out of the river, like starving horses. The moment the men climbed out of the raft, they were surrounded by hungry, hopeful people. They responded by flashing their badges, unholstering their pistols, and announcing that they were there to investigate the rape and murder of a heroic woman. A chorus of angry curses erupted. The scowling investigator demanded to see the survivors’ leader, and was directed to Lu Liren, who lay on the muddy ground, his gray uniform torn apart by his bloated body. “That’s him.” Holding his nose, the investigator made a wide turn around the decaying, fly-specked body of Lu Liren, searching out the farm’s security section chief, who had reported the crime by telephone. He was told that the man had floated down the river on a plank three days earlier. The investigator stopped in front of Ji Qiongzhi; the chilled looks they exchanged revealed the complex emotions of a divorced couple. “The death of a person means about as much as the death of a dog these days, doesn’t it?” she said. “So what’s to investigate?” The investigator glanced out at the corpses floating in the murky water, some animal and others human, and said, “Those are two separate matters.” So they went looking for Shangguan Jintong and began to grill him, applying a range of psychological tactics. But Jintong held firm, refusing to divulge this final secret.
Several days later, after tramping through a sea of knee-high mud, the conscientious chief investigator and the medical examiner found Long Qingping’s body, which had been snagged by the wire fence. But as the examiner was photographing the body, it exploded like a time bomb, its rotting skin and sticky juices fouling the water over a wide area. All that remained snagged on the fence was a skeleton. The medical examiner retrieved the skull, with its bullet hole, and examined it from every angle. He arrived at two conclusions: the muzzle was up against the temple when the shot was fired, and while it looked like suicide, murder was a possibility.
They prepared to take Jintong back with them, but were quickly surrounded by rightists. “Take a good look at this boy,” Ji Qiongzhi said, taking advantage of her special relationship with the chief investigator. “Does he look like someone who’s capable of rape and murder? That woman was a terrifying demon. This boy, on the other hand, was my student.”
By that time, the chief investigator had himself nearly been driven to suicide by hunger and the pervasive stench. “The case is closed,” he said, fed up with the whole matter. “Long Qingping took her own life.” With that, he and the medical examiner climbed into their rubber raft to return to headquarters. But the raft no sooner left the bank than it spun around and was swept downriver.
6
In the spring of 1960, when the countryside was littered with the corpses of famine victims, members of the Flood Dragon River Farm rightist unit were transformed into a herd of ruminants, scouring the earth for vegetation to quell their hunger. Everyone was limited to an ounce and a half of grain daily, minus the amount skimmed off the top by the storekeeper, the manager of the dining hall, and other important individuals. What remained was enough for a bowl of porridge so thin they could see their reflection in it. But that didn’t release them from their duties of rebuilding the farm. Also, with the help of soldiers from the local artillery unit, they cultivated acres of muddy land with millet. Poison was added to the fertilizer to keep away the thieves. It was so potent that the ground was carpeted with dead crickets, worms, and assorted other insects unknown to the rightist Fang Huawen, who was a trained biologist. Birds that fed on insects flopped over stiff, and critters that came to feed on their corpses hopped into the air and were dead before they hit the ground.
In the spring, when the millet crop was knee high, all sorts of vegetables were ready to be picked, and the rightists out in the field crammed whatever they could find into their mouths as they worked. During rest periods, they sat in trenches, regurgitating the leafy mess in their stomachs to chew it up as finely as possible. Green saliva gathered at the corners of their mouths, on faces so bloated the skin was translucent.
No more than ten farm workers were spared from dropsy. The new director, called Little Old Du, was one of them; the granary storekeeper, Guo Zilan, was another, and everyone knew they were pilfering horse feed. Special Agent Wei Guoying did not suffer, since his wolfhound warranted a supply of meat. Another man, by the name of Zhou Tianbao, was also spared. As a child he’d blown off three of his fingers with a homemade bomb; years later, he’d lost an eye when his rifle blew up in his face. Put in charge of farm security, he slept during the day and prowled every corner of the farm at night, armed with a Czech rifle. He was housed in a tiny sheet-metal hut in a corner of the military hardware scrapyard, from which the fragrant odor of meat being cooked often emerged late at night. The smell made sleep all but impossible for people in the area. One night, Guo Wenhao crept over to the hut and was about to peek in the window when he felt the thud of a rifle butt. “Damn you,” Zhou Tianbao cursed, the light from his one good eye cutting through the darkness. “A counterrevolutionary! What are you doing, sneaking around like this?” The muzzle of Zhou’s rifle dug into Guo’s back. “What’s cooking in there, Tianbao?” Guo asked mischievously. “How about giving me a taste?” “I doubt that you have the guts,” Zhou grumbled softly. “The only thing with four legs I won’t eat is a table,” Guo said. “And the only two-legged thing I won’t eat is a person.” Zhou laughed. “That’s human meat I’m cooking.” Guo Wenhao turned and ran.
Word that Zhou Tianbao was eating human flesh quickly made the rounds, throwing everyone into a panic. People slept with one eye open, terrified that Zhou would come get them for his next meal. In order to quell the rumor, Little Old Du called a meeting to announce that he had looked into the matter, and that Zhou Tianbao was cooking and eating rats he found in abandoned tanks. He told everyone, especially the rightists, to quit acting like stinking intellectuals and learn how to open up new sources of food, like Zhou Tianbao, in order to save up grain during lean years and make it possible to support people throughout the world who are worse off than us. Wang Siyuan, a graduate of an agricultural college, suggested growing mushrooms on rotting wood; Little Old Du gave him the go-ahead. Two weeks later, the mushroom plan led to the poisoning of more than a hundred people; some suffered no more t
han a bout of vomiting and diarrhea, but others were temporarily deranged, as if they were speaking in tongues. The security section thought it was an act of sabotage, but the health department attributed it to food poisoning. As a result, Little Old Du was censured, and the rightist Wang Siyuan was reclassified as an ultra-rightist. Most of the victims were treated in time and were soon out of danger. Huo Lina, on the other hand, could not be saved. In the aftermath of her death, a rumor spread that she had been involved with a dining hall worker everyone called Pockface Zhang, and that she always got larger helpings of food than the others. Someone said that on a Sunday night, during the movie, the two of them were seen slipping out in the dark into some tall grass.
Huo Lina’s death hit Jintong especially hard, and he refused to believe that someone from a good family who had gone to school in Russia would give herself to anyone as ugly and as coarse as Pockface Zhang for a little extra soup. What happened later on to Qiao Qisha proved him wrong. For when a woman is so undernourished that her breasts lie flat on her chest and her periods stop coming, self-respect and chastity cease to exist. Poor Jintong was to witness the entire incident, from start to finish.
During the spring, some plow oxen were delivered to the farm. Before long, they discovered there weren’t enough females for mating purposes, so they castrated four of the bulls to fatten them up for food. Ma Ruilian was still in charge of the livestock unit, but with significantly less power, now that Li Du was dead. So when Deng Jiarong walked off with all eight of the detached testicles, all she could do was glare at his back. When she detected the salivating fragrance of the testicles on Deng Jiarong’s grill wafting out of the breeding station, she told Chen San to bring some back. Deng demanded a quantity of horse feed in return, to which Ma Ruilian reluctantly agreed, exchanging a catty of dried bean cakes for one of the testicles.