moon on that August 9 evening filled the sky, falling lightly on the backs of Granddad and Father and illuminating the heavy Black Water River, which was like the great but clumsy Chinese race. White eels, thrown into a frenzy by the bloody water, writhed and sparkled on the surface. The blue chill of the water merged with the red warmth of the sorghum bordering the dikes to form an airy, transparent mist that reminded Father of the heavy, spongy fog that had accompanied them as they set out for battle that morning. Only one day, but it seemed like ten years. Yet it also seemed like the blink of an eye.
Father thought back to how his mother had walked him to the edge of the fog-enshrouded village. The scene seemed so far away, though it was right there in front of his eyes. He recalled how difficult the march through the sorghum field had been, how Wang Wenyi had been wounded in the ear by a stray bullet, how the fifty or so soldiers had approached the bridge looking like the droppings of a goat. Then there was Mute’s razor-sharp sabre knife, the sinister eyes, the Jap head sailing through the air, the shrivelled ass of the old Jap officer… Mother soaring to the top of the dike as though on the wings of a phoenix… the fistcakes… fistcakes rolling on the ground… stalks of sorghum falling all around… red sorghum crumpling like fallen heroes…
Granddad hoisted Father, who was asleep on his feet, onto his back and wrapped his arms – one healthy, the other injured – around Father’s legs. The pistol in Father’s belt banged against Granddad’s back, sending sharp pains straight to his heart. It had belonged to the dark, skinny, handsome, and well-educated Adjutant Ren. Granddad was thinking about how this pistol had ended the lives of Adjutant Ren, Fang Seven, and Consumptive Four. He wanted nothing more than to heave the execrable thing into the Black Water River. But it was only a thought. Bending over, he shifted his sleeping son higher up on his back, partly to relieve the excruciating pain in his heart.
All that kept Granddad moving was a powerful drive to push on and continue the bitter struggle against wave after murky wave of obdurate air. In his dazed state he heard a loud clamour rushing towards him like a tidal wave. When he raised his head he spotted a long fiery dragon wriggling its way along the top of the dike. His eyes froze, as the image slipped in and out of focus.
When it was blurred he could see the dragon’s fangs and claws as it rode the clouds and sailed through the mist, the vigorous motions making its golden scales jangle; wind howled, clouds hissed, lightning flashed, thunder rumbled, the sounds merging to form a masculine wind that swept across a huddled feminine world.
When it was clear he could see it was ninety-nine torches hoisted above the heads of hundreds of people hastening towards him. The dancing flames lit up the sorghum on both banks of the river. Granddad lifted Father down off his back and shook him hard.
‘Douguan,’ he shouted in his ear, ‘Douguan! Wake up! Wake up! The villagers are coming for us, they’re coming…’
Father heard the hoarseness in Granddad’s voice and saw two remarkable tears leap out of his eyes.
4
GRANDDAD WAS ONLY twenty-four when he murdered Shan Tingxiu and his son. Even though by then he and Grandma had already done the phoenix dance in the sorghum field, and even though, in the solemn course of suffering and joy, she had conceived my father, whose life was a mixture of achievements and sin (in the final analysis, he gained distinction among his generation of citizens of Northeast Gaomi Township), she had nonetheless been legally married into the Shan family. So she and Granddad were adulterers, their relationship marked by measures of spontaneity, chance, and uncertainty. And since Father wasn’t born while they were together, accuracy demands that I refer to Granddad as Yu Zhan’ao in writing about this period.
When, in agony and desperation, Grandma told Yu Zhan’ao that her legal husband, Shan Bianlang, was a leper, he decapitated two sorghum plants with his short sword. Urging her not to worry, he told her to return three days hence. She was too overwhelmed by the tide of passionate love to concern herself with the implications of his comment. But murderous thoughts had already entered his mind. He watched her thread her way out of the sorghum field and, through the spaces between stalks, saw her summon her shrewd little donkey and nudge Great-Granddad with her foot, waking the mud-caked heap from his drunken stupor. He heard Great-Granddad, whose tongue had grown thick in his mouth, say: ‘Daughter… you… what took you so long to take a piss?… Your father-in-law… going to give me a big black mule…
Ignoring his mumbling, she swung her leg over the donkey’s back and turned her face, brushed by the winds of spring, towards the sorghum field south of the road. She knew that the young sedan bearer was watching her. Struggling to wrench free of this unknown passion, she had a dim vision of a new and unfamiliar broad road stretching out ahead of her, covered with sorghum seeds as red as rubies, the ditches on either side filled with crystal-clear sorghum wine. As she moved down the road, her imagination coloured the genuine article until she could not distinguish between reality and illusion.
Yu Zhan’ao followed her with his eyes until she rounded a bend. Feeling suddenly weary, he pushed his way through the sorghum and returned to the sacred altar, where he collapsed like a toppled wall and fell into a sound sleep. Later, as the red sun was disappearing in the west, his eyes snapped open, and the first things he saw were sorghum leaves, stems, and ears of grain that formed a thick blanket of purplish red above him. He draped his rain cape over his shoulders and walked out of the field as a rapid breeze on the road caused the sorghum to rustle noisily. He wrapped the cape tightly around him to ward off the chill, and as his hand brushed against his belly he realised how hungry he was. He dimly recalled the three shacks at the head of the village where he had carried the woman in the sedan chair three days ago, and the tattered tavern flag snapping and fluttering in the raging winds of the rainstorm. So hungry he could neither sit still nor stand straight, he strode towards the tavern. Since he had been hiring out for the Northeast Gaomi Township Wedding and Funeral Service Company for less than two years, the people around here wouldn’t recognise him. He’d get something to eat and drink, find a way to do what he’d come to do, then slip into the sorghum fields, like a fish in the ocean, and swim far away.
At this point in his ruminations, he headed west, where bilious red clouds turned the setting sun into a blooming peony with a luminous, fearfully bright golden border. After walking west for a while, he turned north, heading straight for the village where Grandma’s nominal husband lived. The fields were still and deserted. During those years, any farmer who had food at home left his field before nightfall, turning the sorghum fields into a haven for bandits.
Village chimneys were smoking by the time he arrived, and a handsome young man was walking down the street with two crocks of fresh well water over his shoulder, the shifting water splashing over the sides. Yu Zhan’ao darted into the doorway beneath the tattered tavern flag. No inner walls separated the shacks, and a bar made of adobe bricks divided the room in two, the inner half of which was furnished with a brick kang, a stove, and a large vat. Two rickety tables with scarred tops and a few scattered narrow benches constituted the furnishings in the outer half of the room. A glazed wine crock rested on the bar, its ladle hanging from the rim. A fat old man was sprawled on the kang. Yu Zhan’ao recognised him as the Korean dog butcher they called Gook. He had seen Gook once at the market in Ma Hamlet. The man could slaughter a dog in less than a minute, and the hundreds of dogs that lived in Ma Hamlet growled viciously when they saw him, their fur standing straight up, though they kept their distance.
‘Barkeep, a bowl of wine!’ Yu Zhan’ao called out as he sat on one of the benches.
The fat old man didn’t stir, his rolling eyes the only movement on the kang.
‘Barkeep!’ Yu Zhan’ao shouted.
The fat old man pulled back the white dog pelt covering him and climbed down off the kang. Yu Zhan’ao noticed three more pelts hanging on the wall: one green, one blue, and one spotted.
The fat old man took a dark-red bowl out of an opening in the bar and ladled wine into it.
‘What do you have to go with the wine?’ Yu Zhan’ao asked.
‘Dog head!’ the fat old man snarled.
‘I want dog meat!’
‘Dog head’s all I’ve got!’
‘Okay, then.’
The old man removed the lid from the pot, in which a whole dog was cooking.
‘Forget the head,’ Yu Zhan’ao demanded. ‘I want some of that meat.’
