performed every acrobatic trick he knew on the straw mat; hard to believe that a heavy medicinal plaster was still stuck to his backside. Second Sister anxiously pushed Mother, who was still grumbling, back into the audience, where she belonged. Three men acting as Japanese soldiers rushed into the center of the stage, bent over at the waist, planning to lift Second Sister over their heads again. “Platoon Leader Tatsuda” was nowhere to be found, so it was up to the other three; two of them lifted her head and shoulders, the third held her feet, his painted face sticking up between her legs. It was such a funny sight that the audience couldn’t help but giggle, and that turned to laughter when he made a funny face. So then he started hamming it up, and the audience exploded with boisterous guffaws, which drew a scowl from Sima Ku. But he sang on anyway:
The next morning, the real Japanese surrounded the village. The crack of rifle fire, the thud of artillery, and the loud whinnies of war ponies startled us out of our sleep. With me in her arms, Mother led my seven sisters down into the turnip cellar, crawling through the dark, dank tunnel until we emerged into a wider space, where Mother lit an oil lantern. In the dim light, we sat on a straw mat, cocking our ears and listening to the scattered noises upstairs.
I don’t know how long we sat there before we heard heavy breathing in the dark tunnel. Mother picked up a pair of blacksmith tongs, quickly blew out the lantern, returning the room to darkness. I began to cry. Mother stuffed one of her nipples into my mouth. It was cold, hard, and rigid, and it had a salty, bitter taste.
The heavy breathing drew nearer; Mother raised the tongs over her head with both hands at the very moment I heard my second sister, Zhaodi, call out in a strange voice, “Mother, it’s me, don’t hit me…” With a sigh of relief, Mother let her hands drop weakly in front of her. “Zhaodi,” she said, “you scared me half to death.” “Light the lantern, Mother,” Zhaodi said. “There’s somebody behind me.”
Somehow Mother got the lantern lit; its pale light shone throughout the cave once again. Second Sister was covered with mud and had a scratch on her cheek. She carried a bundle in her arms. “What is that?” Mother asked, registering her surprise. Second Sister scrunched up her mouth, as translucent tears made tracks through the dirt on her face. “Mother,” she said, her voice cracking, “this is his third wife’s son.” Mother froze. Then: “Take that back to wherever you found it!” she said angrily. Second Sister came up to Mother on her knees, looked up, and said, “Can’t you show some mercy, Mother? His family has just been wiped out. This one is all that’s left to carry on the Sima family line…”
Mother pulled back a corner of the bundle, revealing the dark, thin, long face of the last surviving son of the Sima family. The little tyke was fast asleep, breathing evenly; his mouth puckered up, as if suckling in his dream. My heart filled with hatred for him. I spat out the nipple and howled. Mother shoved the nipple, colder and even more bitter-tasting than before, back into my mouth.
“Tell me you’ll take him, Mother, won’t you?” Second Sister asked.
Mother squeezed her eyes shut and said nothing.
Second Sister stood up, thrust the bundled baby into the arms of Third Sister, Lingdi, fell back onto her knees, and banged her head on the ground in a kowtow. “Mother,” she said through her tears, “I’m his woman while I’m alive, and I’ll be his ghost after I die. Please save this child, and I’ll never forget your kindness as long as I live!”
Second Sister stood up and turned to go back out through the tunnel. Mother reached out and stopped her. “Where are you going?” she sobbed.
Second Sister said, “Mother, he has been wounded in the leg and is hiding under the millstone. I must go to him.”
The stillness outside was shattered by the clatter of horse hooves and the crackle of gunfire. Mother moved over to block the entrance to the turnip cellar. “I’ll do what you say, but I won’t let you risk your life out there.”
“His leg won’t stop bleeding, Mother,” Second Sister said. “If I don’t go to him, he’ll bleed to death. And if he dies, what’s the use of my going on living? Let me go, Mother, please…”
Mother let out a howl, but quickly closed her mouth again. “Mother,” Second Sister said, “I’ll get down and kowtow to you again.”
She fell to her knees and banged her head on the ground, then buried her face in Mother’s legs. But then she parted Mother’s legs and quickly crawled out of the room.
5
The nineteen heads of the Sima family hung from a rack outside the Felicity Manor gate all the way up to Qingming, the day of ancestral worship in the warmth of spring, when flowers were in full bloom. The rack, made of five thick and very straight China fir boards, looked something like a swing set. The heads were strung up with steel wire. Even though crows and sparrows and owls had pecked away most of the flesh, it still took little imagination to distinguish the heads of Sima Ting’s wife; his two foolish sons; the first, second, and third wives of Sima Ku; the nine sons and daughters born to those three women; and the father, mother, and two younger brothers of Sima Ku’s third wife, who were visiting at the time. The air hung heavy over the village following the massacre, the survivors taking on the appearance of living ghosts, cooping themselves up in dark rooms during the daytime, daring to emerge only after night had fallen.
There was no news at all of Second Sister after she left us that day. The baby boy she left behind caused us no end of trouble. Mother had to nurse him to keep him from starving to death during those days we spent in our cellar hideaway. With his mouth and eyes opened wide, he greedily sucked up milk that should have been mine. He had an astonishing capacity, sucking breasts dry and then bawling for more. He sounded like a crow when he cried, or a toad, or maybe an owl. And the look on his face was that of a wolf, or a dog, or maybe a wild hare. He was my sworn enemy; the world wasn’t big enough for the two of us. I howled in protest when he took Mother’s breasts as his own; he cried just as loud when I tried to take back what was mine. His eyes remained open when he cried. They were the eyes of a lizard. Damn Zhaodi for bringing home a demon born to a lizard!
Mother’s face turned puffy and pale under this double onslaught, and I sensed dimly that little yellow buds had begun to sprout all over her body, like the turnips that had been in our cellar over the long winter. The first of them appeared on her breasts, and that resulted in a diminished supply of milk, with a sweet, turnipy taste. How about you, little Sima bastard, has that scary taste eluded you? People are supposed to treasure what’s theirs, but that was getting harder and harder to do. If I didn’t suckle, he would for sure. Precious gourds, little doves, enamel vases, your skin has withered, you’ve dried up, your blood vessels have turned purple, your nipples are nearly black; you sag impotently.
In order for both me and that little bastard to survive, Mother courageously led my sisters out of the cellar into the light of day. The grain in our family storage room was all gone, as were the mule and the donkey; the pots and pans and all the dishes had been smashed; and the Guanyin Bodhisattva in the shrine was now a headless corpse. Mother had forgotten to take her foxskin coat into the cellar with her; the lynx coats belonging to my eighth sister and me were nowhere to be seen. The fur on the other coats, which the rest of my sisters never took off, had by then fallen off, giving them the look of mangy wild animals. Shangguan Lu lay beneath the millstone in the storage room. She’d eaten all twenty or so of the turnips Mother had left for her before moving into the cellar, and had shat a pile of cobblestone-looking turds. When Mother went in to see her, she picked up a handful of the petrified turds and flung them at her. The skin of her face looked like frozen, decaying turnip peels; her white hair looked like twisted yarn, some sticking straight up, some hanging down her back. A green light emerged from her eyes. Shaking her head, Mother laid several turnips on the floor in front of her. All the Japanese – or maybe it was Chinese – had left for us was a half cellar of sugar beets that had already begun to sprout. Overcome by
