Snow Prince as I awaited the next pair of breasts. I heard a familiar giggle, but there were no breasts. Red face, red lips, tiny dark eyes – all of a sudden, the face of this flirtatious young woman floated into my mind’s eye.
My left hand touched the fullness of a large breast; my right hand touched nothing, and at that moment I knew that single-breasted Old Jin had arrived. After coming perilously close to being shot following a mass-struggle session, this flirtatious widow, who ran a sesame oil shop, married the poorest man in the village, a homeless beggar named One-eyed Fang Jin, and was now the wife of a poor peasant. Her husband had one eye; she had a single breast. It was a match made in heaven. Old Jin wasn’t really old, but word of her unique style of making love had made the rounds among the village men, and had even reached my ears on several occasions, although I didn’t understand much of what I heard. As I was cupping her breast with my left hand, she grabbed my right hand and brought it over, until her unusually full breast weighted down both hands. Under her guidance, I felt every inch of it. It was a lonely mountain peak spread across the right side of her chest. The top half an easy, relaxing slope, the bottom half was a droopy hemisphere. Hers was the warmest breast I’d ever felt, like a vaccinated rooster, so hot it nearly sparked. It was smooth and glossy, and would have been more so if not for the heat. The end of the droopy hemisphere jutted out like an overturned bowl for wine, tipped by a slightly upturned nipple. It was hard one second, soft the next, like a rubber bullet; several drops of a cool liquid stuck to my hand, and I was reminded of something said to me by a diminutive villager who had traveled to the south to sell silk: he said lusty Old Jin was like a papaya, a woman who oozed white fluids the moment she was touched. Since I’d never seen a papaya, I could only imagine that they were an ugly fruit with a deadly attraction. The discharge of the Snow Prince’s sacred duties was gradually taken off course by Old Jin’s single breast. My hands were like sponges, soaking up the warmth of her breast, and it seemed to me that my fondling brought her contentment as well. Grunting like a little pig, she grabbed my head and buried it in her bosom, where her overheated breast burned my face, and I heard her mutter softly, “Dear boy… my own dear boy…”
The snow market rule was broken.
A single utterance invited disaster.
A green Jeep was parked in the square in front of Taoist Men’s house. Four security police in khaki uniforms with white cotton insignia over the breast pockets piled out and, with nimble precision, burst through Taoist Men’s door; they reappeared moments later with handcuffed Taoist Men in tow. As he was bundled up to the Jeep, he cast a sorrowful look my way, but said nothing. He meekly climbed into the Jeep.
Three months later, the leader of the reactionary sect, Men Shengwu, Taoist Men, who had regularly secreted himself on a high mountain slope to fire signal shots to secret agents, was shot beneath Enchanted Bridge in the county seat. His blind dog ran after the Jeep in the snow, only to have his head blown apart by a sharpshooter riding in the car.
2
I sneezed, and woke myself up. Golden light from the kerosene lamp coated the glistening walls. Mother was sitting beneath the lamp rubbing the golden pelt of a weasel, a pair of shears lying across her knees. The weasel’s bushy tail jumped and leaped in her hand. A grimy, monkey-faced man in a brown army greatcoat sat on a stool in front of the
“Is that you, Jintong?” he asked tentatively as a look of pity shone from his black eyes.
“Jintong,” Mother said, “this is your… it’s your elder cousin Sima…”
It was Sima Ting. I hadn’t seen him in years, and just look what those years had done to him! Sima Ting, the township head who had stood atop the watchtower all those years ago, lively and full of energy, where had he gone? And his fingers, red as ripe carrots, where were they?
Back when the mysterious horseman had shattered the heads of Sima Feng and Sima Huang, Sima Ting had jumped out of the horse trough beside the west wing of our house, like a carp leaping out of the water, as the crack of gunfire split his eardrums. He stormed around the mill house like a spooked donkey, circling it over and over. The clatter of horse’s hooves rolled through the lane like a tidal wave. I have to run away, he was thinking. I can’t hang around here waiting to be killed. With wheat husks clinging to his head, he clambered over our low southern wall and landed in a pile of dog shit. As he lay sprawled on the ground, he heard a disturbance somewhere in the lane, and scrambled on his hands and knees over to an old haystack, which he discovered he shared with a laying hen with a bright red comb. The next sounds he heard, only seconds later, were a heavy thud and the crash of a splintering door. Immediately after that, a gang of men in black masks came outside and headed straight for the wall. They trampled the weeds and grass at the base of the wall in their thick-soled cloth shoes. All were armed with black repeater rifles. Moving with the assurance of fearless bandits, they negotiated the wall like a flock of black swallows He wondered why they had covered their faces, but when he later learned of the deaths of Sima Feng and Sima Huang, a glimmer of light filtered into his clouded mind, clearing up things he hadn’t understood until then. The men spilled into the yard. Caring only for his head and letting his rear end take care of itself, he squirmed into the haystack to await the outcome.
“Number Two is Number Two, and I’m me,” Sima Ting said to Mother in the lamplight. “Let’s be clear on that, Sister-in-law.”
“Then he’ll call you Elder Uncle. Jintong, this is your elder uncle, Sima Ting.”
Before I drifted off to sleep again, I watched Sima Ting take a shiny gold medal out of his pocket and hand it to Mother. “Sister-in-law,” he said in a muffled, bashful voice, “I’ve made amends for my crimes.”
After crawling out of the haystack, Sima Ting slipped out of the village in the dark of night. Half a month later, he was dragooned into a stretcher unit, where he was paired with a dark-faced young man. During one of the battles, he lost three fingers of his left hand in an explosion. But he did not let the pain stop him from carrying a squad leader who had lost a leg to the hospital on his back.
I listened to him prattle on and on, relating all his strange adventures, like a young man spinning yarns to divert attention from his errors. Mother’s head rocked in the lamplight, a golden sheen on her face. The corners of her mouth were turned up slightly in what looked like a sneer.
When I woke up early in the morning, a foul smell assailed my nostrils. I saw Mother in a chair, leaning against the wall, fast asleep. Sima Ting was squatting on a bench next to the
Ji Qiongzhi, who would later be my homeroom teacher, came down from the county government and started a Woman’s Remarriage Campaign in Dalan Town. She brought with her a bunch of female officials who acted like a herd of wild horses; they called a meeting of all the township widows to publicize a campaign to have them remarry. Under their active mobilization and organization, just about all the widows in our village found husbands.
The only widows to become obstacles to this campaign were those of the Shangguan family. No one dared to seek the hand of my eldest sister, Laidi, since all the local bachelors knew she’d been the wife of the traitor Sha Yueliang, had been exploited by Sima Ku, who’d fled the revolution, and that she’d also been the wife of the revolutionary soldier Speechless Sun. Even in death, these three men were no one to get on the bad side of. Mother fell within the age limit set by Ji Qiongzhi, but she refused to remarry. The moment the official stepped foot in the door to try to talk Mother around, she was sent away with a barrage of curses. “Get out of my house!” Mother yelled. “Why, I’m older than your mother!”
But, strangely enough, when Ji Qiongzhi herself came over to give it a try, Mother spoke to her genially: “Young lady,” she said, “who do you plan to have marry me?”
“Someone younger than you would not be a good match, aunty,” Ji Qiongzhi said, “and about the only man in your age group is Sima Ting. Even though there are blemishes in his history, he set everything straight with his meritorious service. Besides, you two have a special relationship.”
With a wry smile, Mother said, “Young lady, his younger brother is my son-in-law.”
