Detachment Leader Leng grabbed the sentry’s sleeve and asked angrily, ‘How many Japs? Are they real Japs or lackeys?’
‘I think they’re lackeys. Their uniforms are yellow. A whole line of yellow, running towards the village at a crouch.’
‘Lackeys? Kill the sons of bitches. Company Commander Qi, take your men up to the wall, and hurry!’ he ordered.
Then he turned to two guards with machine guns. ‘Keep an eye on them,’ he commanded. ‘Pop ’em if they act up!’ Surrounded by his bodyguards, he ran at a crouch towards the northern edge of the village.
Less than a quarter of an hour later, fighting broke out. The opening salvos of rifle fire were followed by machine-gun fire, and before long the air was filled with the shrieks of incoming projectiles that exploded in the village, sending shrapnel slamming into the village wall and the trunks of trees. Amid the din of shouting came the
It was real Japs after all, not lackeys. Detachment Leader Leng and his troops put up a stubborn defence, but abandoned their positions after half an hour of fighting and fell back to the cover of toppled walls.
Japanese artillery shells were already falling into the inlet. The anxious Jiao-Gao and Iron Society soldiers stomped their feet and ducked their heads. ‘Untie us!’ they bellowed angrily. ‘Fuck your living mothers! Untie us! If you came out of Chinese pricks, untie us. If you came out of Japanese pricks, then kill us!’
The guards ran to the stack of rifles and picked up two swords, with which they cut their prisoners’ ropes.
Eighty soldiers ran like madmen to the stack of rifles and the pile of hand grenades; then, ignoring the numbness of their arms and the hunger in their bellies, they charged the Japanese, yelling wildly as they ran straight into a hail of lead.
Several dozen columns of smoke rose from the village wall following the explosions of the first salvo of hand grenades thrown by the Jiao-Gao and Iron Society soldiers.
FIVE:
1
FULL PURPLE LIPS, like ripe grapes, gave Second Grandma – Passion – her extraordinary appeal. The sands of time had long since interred her origins and background. Her rich, youthful, resilient flesh, her plump bean-pod face, and her deep-blue, seemingly deathless eyes were buried in the wet yellow earth, extinguishing for all time her angry, defiant gaze, which challenged the world of filth, adored the world of beauty, and brimmed over with an intense consciousness. Second Grandma had been buried in the black earth of her hometown. Her body was enclosed in a coffin of thin willow covered with an uneven coat of reddish-brown varnish that failed to camouflage its wormy, beetle-holed surface. The sight of her blackened, blood-shiny corpse being swallowed up by golden earth is etched forever on the screen of my mind.
In the warm red rays of the sun, I saw a mound in the shape of a human figure rising atop the heavy, deeply remorseful sandbar. Second Grandma’s shapely figure; Second Grandma’s high-arching breasts; tiny grains of shifting sand on Second Grandma’s furrowed brow; Second Grandma’s sensual lips protruding through the golden- yellow sand… I knew it was an illusion, that Second Grandma was buried beneath the black earth of her hometown, and that only red sorghum grew around her gravesite.
Standing at the head of her grave – as long as it isn’t during the winter, when the plants are dead and frozen, or on a spring day, when cool southerly breezes blow – you can’t even see the horizon for the nightmarishly dense screen of Northeast Gaomi sorghum. Then you raise your gaunt face, like a sunflower, and through the gaps in the sorghum you can see the stunning brilliance of the sun hanging in the kingdom of heaven. Amid the perennially mournful sobs of the Black Water River you listen for a lost soul drifting down from that kingdom.
2
THE SKY WAS a beautiful clear blue. The sun hadn’t yet made an appearance, but the chaotic horizon on that early-winter morning was infused with a blinding red light when Old Geng shot at a red fox with a fiery torch of a tail. Old Geng had no peers among hunters in Saltwater Gap, where he bagged wild geese, hares, wild ducks, weasels, foxes, and, when there was nothing else around, sparrows. In the late autumn and early winter, enormous flocks of sparrows flew over Northeast Gaomi Township, a shifting brown cloud that rolled and tumbled above the boundless land. At dusk they returned to the village, where they settled on willows whose naked, yellowing limbs drooped earthward or arched skyward. As the dying red rays of the evening sun burned through the clouds, the branches lit up with sparrows’ black eyes shining like thousands of golden sparks. Old Geng picked up his shotgun, squinted, and pulled the trigger. Two sparrows crashed to the ground like hailstones as shotgun pellets tore noisily through the branches. Uninjured sparrows saw their comrades hit the ground and flapped their wings, rising into the air like shrapnel sent flying high into a lethargic sky.
Father had eaten some of Old Geng’s sparrows when he was young. They were delicious. Three decades later, my older brother and I went into the sorghum field and engaged some crafty sparrows in a heated battle. Old Geng, who was already over seventy by then and lived alone as a pensioner, was one of our most revered villagers. Asked to speak at meetings to air grievances against the old order, he invariably stripped to the waist onstage to show his scars. ‘The Japs bayoneted me eighteen times,’ he’d say, ‘until you couldn’t see my skin for all the blood. But I didn’t die, and you know why? Because I was protected by a fox fairy. I don’t know how long I lay there, but when I opened my eyes all I could see was a bright-red light. The fox fairy was licking my wounds.’
In his home, Old Geng – Eighteen Stabs Geng – kept a fox-fairy memorial tablet, which some Red Guards decided to smash during the Cultural Revolution. They changed their minds and got out of there fast when they saw him kneel in front of the tablet wielding a cleaver.
Old Geng drew a bead on the red fox, knowing exactly which way it would run; but he was reluctant to shoot. He knew he could sell the beautiful, bushy pelt for a good price. If he was going to shoot, it had to be now. The fox had already enjoyed a full life, sneaking over nightly to steal a chicken. No matter how strong the villagers made their chicken coops, the fox always found a way inside and no matter how many traps they set, it always got away. That year the villagers’ chicken coops seemed built solely to store its food.
Old Geng had walked out of the village as the roosters were crowing for the third time and gone straight to a low embankment alongside the swamp in front of the village, where he waited for the chicken thief to show up. Dried-up marsh weeds stood waist-high in the swamp, where a thin sheet of nearly transparent ice, possibly thick enough to bear a man’s weight, covered the stagnant water that had accumulated during the autumn rains. Yellow tassels atop imprisoned reeds shivered in the freezing morning air, as powerful rays of light from far off in the eastern sky gradually illuminated the icy surface, which gave off a moist radiance, like the scales of a carp. Then the eastern sky turned bright, staining the ice and reeds the colour of mottled blood. Old Geng picked up the odour and saw a tight cluster of reeds part slowly like an undulating wave, then close up quickly. He stuck his nearly frozen index finger into his mouth and breathed on it, then wrapped it around the frost-covered trigger.
The fox bounded out of the clump of reeds and stood on the ice, turning it a bright red, as though it had gone up in flames. Congealed blood covered its pointy little snout; a chicken feather the colour of hemp was stuck in its whiskers. It walked with stately grace across the ice. Old Geng cried out, and it froze on the spot, squinting to get a good look at the embankment. Old Geng shivered, closed his eyes, and fired.
Like a little fireball, the fox rolled into the reeds. Old Geng, his shoulder numb from the recoil, stood up under a silvery sky, looking bigger and taller than usual. He knew the fox was hiding amid the reeds and staring at him with loathing. Something suspiciously like a guilty conscience began to stir in Old Geng. He thought back over the past year and the trust the fox had shown in him: it always knew he was hiding behind the embankment, yet it
