squeezed through the holes of a sieve.
Some white, squiggly words appeared on the screen, several lines of them, some big and some small, rising from the bottom. More shouts from the crowd. Water, it’s said, always flows downward, but these foreign words flowed in the opposite direction, disappearing into the blackness of the wall when they reached the top of the screen. A crazy thought popped into my head: Would they be found embedded in the church wall tomorrow morning? Water then appeared on the screen, flowing down a riverbed bordered by trees, noisy birds hopping around on the branches. Our mouths fell open in amazement; we forgot to shout. The next scene was of a man with a rifle slung over his back, his open-front shirt revealing a hairy chest. A cigarette dangled from his lips, smoke curling upward from the tip and streaming out from his nostrils. My god, what a sight! A black bear lumbered out from a stand of trees and went straight for the man. Shrieks from women and the sound of a pistol being cocked erupted in the church. The silhouette of a man burst into the beam of light. Sima Ku again. Revolver in hand. He had intended to shoot the bear, but its image on the screen behind him was shattered.
“Sit down, you damned fool!” Babbitt shouted. “Sit down! It’s a movie!”
Sima Ku sat back down, but by then the bear already lay dead on the screen, a stream of green blood seeping from its chest. The hunter was sitting on the ground beside it, reloading.
“Son of a bitch!” Sima Ku shouted. “What a marksman!”
The man on the screen looked up, muttered something I couldn’t understand, and then smiled contemptuously. Slinging his rifle over his back again, he stuck two fingers in his mouth and let out a shrill whistle, which echoed in the church. A horse-drawn wagon rumbled up along the riverbank. The horse had a proud, defiant look, but in a sort of stupid way. Its harness looked familiar, as if I’d seen it somewhere. A woman stood in the wagon behind the shaft, her long hair tossing in the wind; I couldn’t tell what color it was. She had a big face, a jutting forehead, gorgeous eyes, and curled lashes as black and bristly as a cat’s whiskers. Her mouth was enormous, her lips black and shiny. She looked immoral to me. Her breasts bounced and jiggled like crazy, like a pair of white rabbits caught by the tail. They were much bigger and fuller than any in the Shangguan family. She drove the wagon straight toward me at a gallop; my heart lurched, my lips tingled, my palms were sweaty. I jumped to my feet, but was pushed back down on the bench by a powerful hand on my head. I turned to look. The man’s mouth was wide open; I didn’t recognize him. The area behind him was packed with people, some even blocking the door. Others seemed to be hanging on the doorframe. Out in the street, people clamored to squeeze in.
The woman reined the horse in and jumped down off the wagon. She picked up the hem of her dress, exposing her milky white legs, and shouted, to the man, that I could tell. Then she took off running, still shouting. Sure enough, she was shouting at him. Ignoring the dead bear, he took his rifle off his back, threw it to the ground, and ran toward the woman. Her face, her eyes, her mouth, her white teeth, her heaving breasts. Then the face of the man, bushy eyebrows, eyes like a hawk, a glistening beard, and a shiny scar that separated his brow from his temple. Back to the woman’s face. Then back to the man’s. The woman’s feet as she flicked off her shoes. The man’s clumsy feet. The woman ran into the man’s arms. Her breasts were flattened. She attacked the man’s face with her large mouth. His mouth clamped over hers. Then, your mouth is outside, mine is inside. Two mouths coupling. Moans and chirps, all from the woman. Then their arms, draped around a neck or wrapped around a waist. The hands began to roam, over me, over you, until finally the two of them fell to the grassy carpet and began to writhe and tumble, the man on top one minute, the woman on top the next. They rolled around, over and over, for quite some distance, and then stopped. The man’s hairy hand slipped under the woman’s dress and grabbed one of her full breasts. My poor heart was being torn apart, and hot tears spilled out of my eyes.
The beam of light went out and the screen went dark.
Sima Ku jumped to his feet. “I’ll be goddamned!” he said with a hearty laugh. “Don’t stop now, play it again!”
4
On the fourth night, the movie-viewing was moved to the Sima compound’s spacious threshing floor, where the Sima Battalion – officers and men – and the commanders’ families sat in the seats of honor, village and township bigwigs sat in rows behind them, while ordinary citizens stood wherever they could find room. The large white sheet was hung in front of a lotus-covered pond, behind which the old, infirm, and crippled stood or sat, enjoying their view of the movie from the back, along with the sight of people watching it from the front.
That day was recorded in the annals of Northeast Gaomi Township, and as I think back now, I can see that nothing that day was normal. The weather was stiflingly hot at noon; the sun was black, sending fish belly-up in the river and birds falling out of the sky. A lively young soldier was felled by cholera while digging postholes and hanging the screen, and as he writhed on the ground in excruciating pain, a green liquid poured from his mouth; that was not normal. Dozens of purple snakes with yellow spots formed lines and wriggled their way down the street; that was not normal. White cranes from the marshes landed on soap-bean trees at the entrance to the village, flocks and flocks of them, their sheer weight snapping off branches, white feathers blanketing the trees. Flapping wings, necks like snakes, and stiff legs; that was not normal. Gutsy Zhang, who had gained his nickname owing to his status as the strongest man in the village, tossed a dozen stone rollers from the threshing floor into the pond; that was not normal. In midafternoon, a group of travel-weary strangers showed up. They sat on the bank of the Flood Dragon River to eat flatcakes as thin as paper and chew on radishes. When asked where they’d come from, they said Anyang, and when asked why they’d come, they said for the movies. When asked how they’d learned that movies were being shown here, they said that good news travels faster than the wind; this was not normal. Mother uncharacteristically told us a joke about a foolish son-in-law, and this too was not normal. At sunset, the sky turned radiant with burning colors that kept changing; this too was not normal. The waters of the Flood Dragon River ran blood red, and this too was not normal. As night began to fall, mosquitoes gathered in swarms that floated above the threshing floor like dark clouds, which was not normal. On the surface of the pond, late-blooming lotuses looked like celestial beings beneath the reddening sunset, and this was not normal. My goat’s milk reeked of blood, and that truly was not normal.
Having taken my evening fill of milk, I ran like the wind over to the threshing floor with Sima Liang, drawn irresistibly to the movie, running head-on toward the sunset. We set our sights on the women carrying benches and dragging their children along and the oldsters with canes, since they were the ones we could easily overtake. Xu Xian’er, a blind man with a captivatingly hoarse voice, survived by singing for handouts. He was up ahead walking fast, making his way by tapping the ground in front of him. The proprietor of the cooking oil shop, an aged single- breasted woman known as Old Jin, asked him, “Where are you off to in such a hurry, blind man?” “I’m blind,” he said. “Are you blind too?” An old man called White Face Du, a fisherman wearing his customary palm-bark cape, was carrying a stool made of woven cat-tail. “How do you expect to watch a movie, blind man?” he asked. “White Face,” the blind man replied angrily, “to me you’re a white asshole! How dare you say I’m blind! I close my eyes so I can see through worldly affairs.” Swinging his pole over his head until it whistled in the wind, he came dangerously close to snapping one of White Face Du’s egret-like legs. Du stepped up to the blind man and was about to hit him with his cattail stool, but was stopped just in time by Half Circle Fang, half of whose face had been licked away by a bear one day when he was up on Changbai Mountain gathering ginseng. “Old Du,” he said, “what would people think if you started a fight with a blind man? We all live in the same village. We win some arguments and we lose others, but it’s always a matter of someone’s bowl smashing into someone else’s plate, and that’s how it goes. Up there on Changbai Mountain, it’s no easy matter to run into a fellow villager, so you feel as if you’re with family!” All sorts of people crowded onto the Sima threshing floor. Just listen, all those families at the dinner table talking about Sima Ku’s achievements, while gossipy women gossip about the Shangguan girls. We felt light as a feather, our spirits soared, and all we wanted was for movies to be shown forever.
Sima Liang and I had reserved seats right in front of Babbitt’s machine. Shortly after we sat down and before the colors had finished burning their way across the western sky, a rank, salty smell came to us on the gloomy night winds. Directly in front of us was an empty circle marked off by quicklime. Deaf Han Guo, a crooked-legged villager,
