The Garlic Ballads

  “What’s bothering you, Sister-in-Law?” Fourth Aunt said.

  No response; just more tears.

  “Whatever it is, don’t let it get you down.” Even Fourth Aunt was crying now. “Life’s hard enough already. Sometimes I think dogs are better off than we are. People feed them when they’re hungry, and as a last resort, they can survive on human waste. And since they’ve got furry bodies, they don’t have to worry about clothing. But we have to feed and clothe our families, and that keeps us hopping till we’re too old to take care of ourselves. Then, if we’re lucky, our children will take care of us. If not, we’re abused till the day we die.” Fourth Aunt reached up to dry her aging eyes.

  The middle-aged woman rolled over and buried her face in her blanket, crying so bitterly her shoulders heaved. So Fourth Aunt climbed unsteadily off her cot, went over and sat down beside her. “Sister-in-Law,” she said softly, patting her back, “don’t do this to yourself. Try to see things as they are. The world wasn’t made for people like us. We must accept our fate. Some people are born to be ministers and generals, others to be slaves and lackeys, and there’s nothing anybody can do about it. The old man upstairs decided that you and I would share this cell. It’s not so bad. We’ve got a cot and a blanket, and free food. If the window was a little bigger, maybe it wouldn’t be so stuffy … but don’t let it get you down. And if you really can’t go on, then you have to find a way to end it all.”

  The sounds of crying intensified, drawing the attention of the guard. “Number Forty-six, stop that crying!” she ordered, banging the bars with her fist. “Did you hear me? I said stop crying!”

  The order had the desired effect on the sounds but did nothing to lessen the spasms wracking the poor woman’s body.

  Fourth Aunt went back to her own cot, where she removed her shoes and sat with her legs under her. Swarms of flies buzzed around the cell, loud one moment, softer the next. Feeling an itch under her waistband, Fourth Aunt reached down and plucked out something fat and meaty. It was a louse, gray in color and very big. She squeezed it between her thumbnails until it was no more than a crusty shell. Since her home was louse-free, this one must have come from the bedding. She held up her gray blanket and, sure enough, the folds were teeming with the squirming insects. “Sister-in-Law,” she blurted out, “there are lice in our blankets!” Gaining no response, she ignored her cellmate and brought the blanket up close to subject it to a careful search. Soon realizing that squeezing each one between her thumbnails slowed down the process, she began flipping them into her mouth and popping them with her molars—she lacked teeth up front to do the job—then spitting out the shells. They had a light syrupy taste, so addictive that she soon forgot her suffering.

  2.

  Fourth Aunt listened with alarm to the sound of the middle-aged woman retching. She rubbed her eyes, grown tired from her louse hunt, and wiped the remnants of shells from her lips; those that stuck to the back of her hand she scraped off on the wall.

  Her cellmate was doubled over with dry heaves, her mouth spread wide, so she shuffled across the cell and began patting her on the back. After wiping the spitde from the corners of her mouth, the woman lay back wearily and closed her eyes; she was gasping for breath.

  “You’re not … you know, are you?” Fourth Aunt asked.

  The woman opened her dull, lifeless eyes and tried to focus on Fourth Aunt’s face, not understanding the question.

  “I asked if you’re expecting.”

  The woman responded by opening her mouth and wailing, “My baby” and “My little Aiguo.”

  “Please, Sister-in-Law, stop. No more of that,” Fourth Aunt urged. “Tell me what’s bothering you. Don’t keep it bottied up inside.”

  “Auntie … my littie Aiguo is dead I saw it in a dream … head cracked open … blood all over his face … chubby little angel turned into a lifeless bag of bones … like when you were killing those lice…. I held him in my arms, called to him … his rosy cheeks, pretty big eyes … so black you could see yourself in them … flowers all over the riverbank, purple wild eggplants and white wither gourds and bitter fruits the color of egg yolks and pink hibiscus … my Aiguo, a little boy who loved flowers more than girls do, picking those flowers to make a bouquet and stick it under my nose. ‘Smell these, Mommy, aren’t they pretty?’ They’re like perfume,’ I said. He picked a white one and said, ‘Kneel down, Mommy’ I asked him why. He told me just to kneel down. My Aiguo could cry at the drop of a hat, so I knelt down, and he stuck that white flower in my hair. ‘Mommy’s got a flower in her hair!’ I said people are supposed to wear red flowers in their hair—white flowers are unlucky, and you only wear them when someone dies. That scared Aiguo. He started crying. ‘Mommy, I don’t want you to die. I can die, but not you.

  By this time the poor woman was sobbing uncontrollably. The cell door opened with a loud clang, and an armed guard stood in the doorway with a slip of paper in his hand. “Number Forty-six, come with us!” he ordered.

  The woman stopped crying, although her shoulders continued to heave, and her cheeks were still wet with tears. The guard was flanked by white-uniformed police officers. The one to the left, a man, held a pair of brass handcuffs, like golden bracelets; the other one was a short, broad-beamed woman with a pimply face and a hairy black mole at the corner of her mouth.

  “Number Forty-six, come with us!”

  The woman slipped her feet into her shoes and shuffled toward the door, where the policeman snapped the golden bracelets onto her wrists. “Let’s go.”

  She turned to look at Fourth Aunt. There was no life in her eyes, nothing. Fourth Aunt was so frightened by that look she couldn’t move, and when she heard the cell door clang shut she could no longer see anything—not the guard, not the guard’s shiny bayonet, not the white police officers nor the gray woman. Her eyes burned, and the cell went dark.

  3.

  Where are they taking her? Fourth Aunt wondered, listening for signs; but all she heard were the crickets outside her steel cage and, from farther off—possibly from the public highway—the sounds of metal banging against metal. The cell was getting lighter; bottleneck flies darted around like blue-green meteors.

  With the departure of her cellmate, Fourth Aunt experienced the anxieties of loneliness. She sat on Number Forty-six’s cot, until she vaguely recalled being told by the pretty guard that inmates were not allowed to sit on any cot but their own. She shook open her cellmate’s blanket and was hit in the face by a blast of foul air. It was coated with dark spots like droppings or dried blood, and when she scraped it with her fingernail, a horde of lice scurried out of the folds. She popped some of them into her mouth, bit down, and started to cry. She was thinking about Fourth Uncle and the way he caught lice.

  Fourth Uncle sat against the wall in the sun-baked yard, stripped to the waist, his jacket draped across his knees as he picked lice out of the folds and flipped them into a chipped bowl filled with water. “Get all you can, old man,” Fourth Aunt said. “When you’ve got a bowlful, I’ll fry them to go with your wine.”

  Jinju, still a little girl, stuck close to her father. “How come you’ve got so many lice, Daddy?”

  “The poor get lice, the rich get scabies,” he said, flipping a particularly fat one into the bowl. As Jinju was swishing the drowning lice around with a blade of grass, a bald hen walked up, cocked its head, and scrutinized the insects.

  “The hen wants to eat our lice, Daddy,” she said.

  “I had to work too hard for these to let you gobble them up,” he said as he shooed the chicken away.

  “Give her some, and shell lay more eggs.”

  “I promised Mr. Wang in West Village I’d bring a thousand,” Fourth Uncle said.

  “What does he want them for?”

  “To make medicine.”

  “You can make medicine out of lice?”

  “You can medicine out of just about everything.”

  “How many have you got so far?”


  “Eight hundred and forty-seven.”

  “Want some help?”

  “No. He said no females could touch these. He can’t make medicine out of them if they’ve been touched by female hands.”

  Jinju pulled back her hand.

  “It’s not easy being a louse,” he told her. “Did you ever hear the story of the city louse and the country louse who meet on the road? The city louse asks, ‘Say, country brother, where are you off to?’ The country louse says, To the city. How about you?’ ‘I’m off to the country,’ the city louse replies. ‘What for?’ To get something to eat.’ ‘Forget it. I’m going to town to find food.’ When the city louse asks why, he says, ‘In the countryside they scour their clothing three times a day, and if they can’t find anything, they beat it with a club and pop whatever comes out into their mouths. If we’re not beaten to death we’re bitten to death. I barely escaped with my life.’ The country louse relates its tale of woe tearfully. The city louse sighs and says, ‘I assumed things had to be better in the countryside than in the city. I never thought they could be worse.’ Things must be better in the city than in the countryside,’ the country louse says. ‘Like hell they are!’ the city louse says. ‘In the city everybody wears silks and satins, layer upon layer of them. They clean them three times a day and change them five. We never catch a ghmpse of flesh. If the iron doesn’t get us, the water will. I barely escaped with my life.’ The two lice cry on each other’s shoulders for a while, and when they realize they have nowhere to go, they jump down a well and drown themselves.”

  Jinju was in stitches. “Daddy, you made that up.”

  With the sound of her daughter’s laughter in her ears, Fourth Aunt sniffled and bit down on a louse, saddened by thoughts of happier days. Putting aside her hunt for lice, she walked barefoot up to the barred window. But it was too high for her to see outside, so she went back and stood on the cot to get a better look. She could see a barbed-wire fence and, beyond that, fields planted with cucumbers, eggplants, and broad beans. The beans were yellowing, the eggplants blooming. A pair of pink-and-white butterflies flew around the purple flowers, moving back and forth between the bean trellises and the eggplant flowers. Fourth Aunt sat down and recommenced her hunt for lice in the blanket, and her mournful memories.

  4.

  It was the fourth time that morning that the parakeets in the East Lane compound of Gao Zhileng had raised a din. Fourth Aunt nudged Fourth Uncle with the tip of her foot. “Hey, old man, it’s time to get up. This is the fourth time I’ve heard the parakeets this morning.”

  He sat up, threw a jacket over his shoulders, and filled his pipe. Then he sat on the kang smoking as he listened to the nightmarishly shrill cries of the parakeets. “Go out and take a look at the stars,” he said. “You can’t rely on a bunch of pet birds. Only roosters know when it’s dawn.”

  “Everybody says parakeets are smart,” she said, her eyes flashing in the darkness. “Have you ever looked at Gao Zhileng’s birds? They’re so colorful—green, yellow, red—-and they tuck their hooked beaks into their wing feathers, so only their bright little eyes show. Everybody says they’ve got the devil in them, which means Gao Zhileng is on the devil’s payroll. I never did trust him.”

  Fourth Uncle puffed on his pipe until the bowl glowed red, but didn’t say a word. The parakeets’ squawks cut through the darkness, loud one second, soft the next, and Fourth Aunt could envision the colorful birds cocking their heads and eying her.

  She pulled the covers up over her legs, growing more fearful by the minute and wishing that her cellmate would hurry back. Guards shouted in the corridor, where she heard frequent footsteps.

  Out in the yard Fourth Aunt felt chilled. A sleek cat streaked across the top of the wall and was gone. She shivered and scrunched her head down between her shoulders as she gazed into the sky, where stars twinkled brighdy. The Milky Way seemed denser than last year. She sought out her three familiar stars. There they were, in the southeastern sky, beside the brilliant half-moon. It was still the middle of the night. She headed over to the new catde shed at the foot of the eastern wall and, by groping in the dark, added some straw to the trough. Their spotted cow, bought the previous spring, lay on the ground chewing her cud, green lights emerging from her eyes. But when she heard the activity near her trough she got up and ambled over, bumping Fourth Aunt’s head with her short, curved horns. “Ouch!” Fourth Aunt exclaimed as she rubbed her head. “Are you trying to kill me, you stupid animal?”

  The cow was already busily munching straw, so Fourth Aunt moved up and felt her belly. Another three months and it would be time to calf.

  “Well?” Fourth Uncle asked her when she returned to the kang.

  “It’s still the middle of the night,” she replied. “Get some more sleep. I fed the cow while I was up.”

  “I’m awake now,” he said, “so I might as well get on the road. Yesterday was a wasted trip, so I want to get there early today. It’s fifteen miles to town, and the way that cow plods along, it’ll be light out by the time we get there.”

  “Are there really that many people selling garlic?”

  “Believe me, there are. The streets are jammed with farmers, trucks, oxcarts, horsecarts, tractors, bicycles, even motorbikes. The line runs from the cold-storage warehouse all the way to the railroad tracks. Garlic, nothing but garlic. They say the warehouse will be full in another day or two.”

  “These are bad times. It’s getting harder to sell anything.”

  “Wake the boys and have them load the wagon and hitch up the cow,” Fourth Uncle said. “I’m in no mood to do it. That tramp Jinju has me so upset the slightest thing gets my heart acting up.”

  “Do you know that your sons are talking about dividing up the family property and going their own way?”

  Tm not blind. Number Two’s afraid his brother will ruin his own marriage prospects. Number One sees how determined Jinju is to be with Gao Ma, and with the marriage contract now a worthless piece of paper, he figures hell take what he can get and live a bachelor’s life. Damned ingrates, that’s what they are!” Fourth Uncle was beside himself. “Once I sell this garlic crop we can add on three rooms, then divide everything up.”

  “Will Jinju stay with us?”

  “She can get her ass out!”

  “Where’s Gao Ma going to get the ten thousand yuan we demanded?”

  “He homesteaded four acres of land this year along with the two he already had, and planted it all with garlic. I passed his field the other day, and I can tell you he’s going to have a bumper crop, six thousand pounds at least, which he’ll sell for five thousand yuan. I’ll take that and tell him he can give me the other half next year. The little tramp’s getting off cheap, but I won’t let her raise some bastard kid here at home.”

  “After she’s gone and We have Gao Ma’s money, she’ll really suffer.”

  “Are you starting to feel sorry for her?” He tapped his pipe on the kang. “I don’t care if the little slut starves.”

  He turned and went out to the cow shed, where Fourth Aunt heard him tap on the west-wing window. “Number One, Number Two—time to get up, load the garlic.” She got down off the kang, lit the lamp, and hung it beside the door, then poured a ladleful of water from the vat into the pot.

  “What’s that for?” Fourth Uncle asked her when he returned.

  “To make some broth,” she replied. “You’ll be walking half the night.”

  “Don’t worry about me,” he snapped back. “I’m not going to walk. I’ll ride the whole way. Go water the cow if you want to make yourself useful.”

  The brothers emerged from their room and stood in the middle of the yard, shivering in the cold night air and not saying a word.

  Meanwhile Fourth Aunt dumped three ladlefuls of water into a basin, spread a layer of bran husks over the top, and stirred it with a poker. Then she carried it outside and laid it on the path as Fourth Uncle led the cow out of the shed. But it just stood there smacking its
lips stupidly without taking a sip.

  “Drink, drink,” she urged the animal. “Drink some water.”

  The cow stood there without moving, a heated stench rising from its hide. The parakeets were at it again, their squawks rising like shifting clouds. The half-moon, a bit higher in the sky now, flooded the yard with golden rays. The stars had lost some of their glitter.

  “Throw in some more bran husks,” Fourth Uncle said.

  Fourth Aunt did as she was told.

  “Come on, girl,” he said, patting the cow gently. “Drink up.”

  The cow lowered her head, snorted into the basin, then began lapping up the water.

  “What are you standing around for?” Fourth Uncle snapped at his sons. “Hitch up the wagon and load the garlic!”

  After fetching the wagon bed, they rolled out the wheels and axles and assembled the vehicle. There were too many thieves in the village to leave it outside the gate. All the garlic had been stacked in bundles by the southern wall, under sheets of plastic.

  “Sprinkle some water on it to keep it from drying out,” Fourth Uncle said. His eldest son did as he was told.

  “Why not take Number Two along?” his wife asked him.

  “No,” he said curtly.

  “Stubborn ass,” she groused. “At least get something decent to eat in town, since I don’t have anything to send with you.”

  “I thought there was still half a grainy flatcake,” Fourth Uncle said.

  “That’s all you’ve eaten for days.”

  “Get it for me.” He led the cow out the gate and hitched it to the wagon. Then he walked back into the yard, threw a tattered coat over his shoulders, stuffed the cold flatcake down the front of his shirt, picked up a switch, and headed out the gate.

  “The older you are, the more mule-headed you get,” she complained. “I don’t know what else to call someone who won’t let his own son help him sell his harvest.”