Second Master Cao raised his gong. The sound split the air. Granddad squatted down at the head of the coffin, the most dangerous, the heaviest, the most glorious spot of all. The thick cotton rope pulled hard against his neck and shoulders, and he realised how heavy the coffin was before he’d even straightened up.
Second Master Cao banged his gong three more times. A shout of ‘Heave!’ cleaved the air.
Granddad took a deep breath and held it, sending all his energy and strength down to his knees. He dimly heard Second Master Cao’s command; dazed though he was, he forced the strength concentrated in his knees to burst forth, fantasising that the coffin containing the corpse of the Hanlin scholar had begun to levitate and float atop the curling incense smoke like a ship on the ocean. The fantasy was shattered by the pressure of the brick floor on his buttocks and sharp pains up and down his backbone.
The enormous coffin remained anchored in place like a tree with deep roots. Second Master Cao nearly fainted when he saw his bearers crumple to the floor like sparrows that had smashed into windows. He knew they were finished. The curtain had come crashing down on this drama! There was the vigorous, energetic Yu Zhan’ao, sitting on the floor like an old woman holding a dead infant. There was no mistaking it now: the drama had ended in complete failure.
Granddad imagined the mocking laughter of the Hanlin scholar in his tomb of shifting quicksilver.
‘Men,’ Second Master Cao said, ‘you have to carry it out… not for my sake… for Northeast Gaomi Township…’
Squeezing his eyes shut, he began raising himself up, crazily, suicidally (amid the chaos of lifting the coffin, Second Master Cao saw the bearer called Little Rooster quickly thrust his lips into the bowl on top of the coffin and take a big gulp of wine). With a tremor, the coffin rose up off the stools. The deathly stillness of the room was broken only by the cracking of human joints.
Granddad had no way of knowing that his face was as pale as death. All he knew was that the thick cotton rope was strangling him, that his neck was about to snap, and that his vertebrae were compressed until they must have looked like flattened hawthorns. When he found he was unable to straighten up, it took only a split second for despair to undermine his resolve, and his knees began to buckle like molten steel. The quicksilver shifted, causing the head of the coffin to press down even harder on him. The bowl on top sloped to one side, the colourless wine inside touching the rim and threatening to overflow. Members of the Qi family stared at it wide-eyed.
Second Master Cao gave Granddad a vicious slap.
Granddad would later recall that the slap had set his ears ringing, and that all feeling in his waist, legs, shoulders, and neck seemed to be squeezed out of his consciousness, as though claimed by some unknown spirit. A curtain of black gauze fell in front of his eyes, and he straightened up, raising the coffin more than three feet off the ground. Six bearers immediately slipped under the coffin on all fours and supported it on their backs. Granddad finally released a mouthful of sticky breath. The breath that followed seemed to him warm and gentle as it rose slowly and passed through his throat…
The coffin was lugged past all seven gates and placed in a bright-blue great canopy.
As soon as the thick white cloth rope fell from Granddad’s back, he forced his mouth open, and streams of scarlet blood spurted from his mouth and nostrils…
3
DRESSED IN MOURNING clothes, Father stood facing southwest on a high bench and thumped the waxwood butt of his rifle on the ground as he shouted: ‘Mother – Mother – head southwest – a broad highway – a long treasure boat – a fleet-footed steed – lots of travelling money – Mother – rest in sweetness – buy off your pain -’
The funeral master had ordered him to sing this send-off song three times, since only a loved one’s calls can guide the spirit to the southwestern paradise. But he got through it only once before choking on hot, sour tears of grief. Another long-drawn-out ‘Mom’ escaped from his lips, fanned out, and glided unsteadily in the air like a scarlet butterfly, its wings carrying it to the southwest, where the wilderness was broad and the airstream swirled, and where the bright sunlight raised a white screen over the Black Water River. Powerless to scale the translucent screen, the wisp of ‘Mom’ turned and headed east after a momentary hesitation, despite Father’s desire to send her to the southwestern paradise. But Grandma didn’t want to go there. Instead she followed the meandering dike, taking fistcakes to Granddad’s troops, turning her head back from time to time to signal her son, my father, with her golden eyes.
Twenty days earlier, Father had gone with Granddad to dig up Grandma’s grave. It was definitely not a good day for swallows, for a dozen sodden clouds, like torn cotton wadding, hung in the low sky, reeking like rotting fish and spoiled shrimp. An ill wind carried a stream of sinister air down the Black Water River, along whose banks the corpses of dogs shattered by muskmelon grenades during the battle with humans the previous winter lay decomposing amid the sallow water grass; swallows migrating north from Hainan Island flew across the river with dread, as frogs below began their mating ritual, gaunt bodies caught up in the passions of love following a winter of hibernation.
Father stood with Granddad and nineteen Iron Society soldiers, all carrying hoes and pickaxes, at the head of Grandma’s grave. Golden flowers of bitterweed, the first of the year, dotted the faded black earth of the column of mounds.
Three minutes of silence.
‘Douguan, you’re sure this is the one?’ Granddad asked.
‘It’s this one,’ Father replied. ‘I could never forget.’
‘Okay,’ Granddad said. ‘Start digging!’
The Iron Society soldiers raised their tools, but were reluctant to start. So Granddad took a pickaxe from one of them, aimed at the mound, which arched up like a woman’s breast, and swung with all his might, to bury the tool in the soil with a heavy thud. He then pulled it towards him, scooping out a chunk of the black earth.
Father’s heart knotted up as the pickaxe split the grave mound, and at that instant he experienced fear and loathing for Granddad’s ruthlessness.
‘Dig it up,’ Granddad said feebly.
Forming a ring around Grandma’s grave, the soldiers began to chop and dig, levelling the mound in no time. Father’s thoughts returned to the night of the ninth day of the eighth lunar month, 1939, when they had buried Grandma. Fires raging on the bridge and torches ringing her body had illuminated her dead face, nearly bringing it back to life, before it was swallowed up by the black earth. Now the likeness was being dug up again, and Father grew tense as the layers were pared away, until he thought he saw Grandma’s smile as she kissed death through the earth separating them.
The Iron Society soldiers stopped digging when the final layer of soil covering the sorghum was removed and cast pleading looks at Granddad and Father, who saw their noses twitch as the overpowering stench of decay rose from the grave. To Father, who breathed in greedily, it was the odour of the milk he’d suckled at Grandma’s breast.
‘Clear it away!’ Granddad ordered, his black eyes devoid of pity. ‘Clear it away!’
Reluctantly they bent down and began pulling the sorghum out of the grave. Transparent drops of water oozed from the naked stalks, turned by decay into the glossy red of moist jade.
Deeper and deeper they went, the stench growing stronger. But to Father it was the rich aroma of sorghum wine, intoxicating, dizzying. He wanted to see Grandma as soon as possible, but the prospect also frightened him. The sorghum covering grew ever thinner, yet he felt the distance between him and Grandma increase. The final layer of stalks suddenly rustled loudly, wrenching shouts of alarm from some of the soldiers and striking others dumb with fear. Their faces were ashen, and only Granddad’s insistence gave them the courage to peek down into the grave.
Father watched as four brown field voles scrambled up the sides of the unearthed grave, while a fifth one, pure white, squatted on a supremely beautiful sorghum stalk in the middle of the grave. Everyone stared at the brown voles as they scampered away; meanwhile, the white one perched haughtily without stirring, staring back with its
