sauntered across the ice as though putting his conscience to the test. And Old Geng had always passed the test. But now he had betrayed this friendship, and he hung his head, gazing into the clump of reeds that had swallowed the fox, not even turning back to look when he heard the clatter of footsteps behind him.
Suddenly he felt a stabbing pain, and stumbled forward, twisting his body, dropping his shotgun to the ice. Something hot squirmed under his pants at the belt line. Running towards him were a dozen uniformed figures armed with rifles and glinting bayonets. Instinctively he yelled in fear, ‘Japan!’
The Japanese soldiers pounced on him and bayoneted him in the chest and abdomen. He screamed pitifully, like a fox howling for its mate. The blood from his wounds pitted the ice beneath him with its heat. He ripped off his tattered shirt with both hands. In his semiconscious state he saw the furry red fox emerge from the clump of reeds and circle round him once, then crouch down and gaze sympathetically. Its fur glowed brilliantly and its slightly slanted eyes shone like emeralds. After a while, Old Geng felt warm fur rubbing against his body, and he lay there waiting for the razor-sharp teeth to begin ripping him apart. If he were torn to shreds, he’d die with no complaints, for he knew that a man who betrays a trust is lower than an animal.
The fox began licking his wounds with its cold tongue.
Old Geng was adamant that the fox had repaid his betrayal by saving his life. Where else could you find another man who had sustained eighteen bayonet wounds yet lived to tell the tale? The fox’s tongue must have been coated with a miraculous substance since Old Geng’s wounds were instantly soothed, as though treated with peppermint oil – or so he said.
3
VILLAGERS WHO HAD gone to town to sell straw sandals announced upon their return: ‘Gaomi has been occupied by the Japanese. There’s a Rising Sun at the entrance!’
The panic-stricken villagers could only wait for the calamity they knew was coming. But not all of them suffered from racing hearts and crawling flesh: two among them went about their business totally unconcerned, never varying their routine. Who were they? One was Old Geng, the other a onetime musician who loved to sing Peking opera – Pocky Cheng.
‘What are you afraid of?’ Pocky Cheng asked everyone he met. ‘We’re still common folk, no matter who’s in charge. We don’t refuse to give the government its grain, and we always pay our taxes. We lie down when we’re told, and we kneel when they order us. So who’d dare punish us? Who, I ask you?’
His advice calmed many of the people, who began sleeping, eating, and working again. But it didn’t take long for the evil wind of Japanese savagery to blow their way: they fed human hearts to police dogs; they raped sixty- year-old women; they hung rows of human heads from electric poles in town. Even with the unflappable examples of Pocky Cheng and Old Geng, rumours of brutality were hard for the people to put aside, especially in their dreams.
Pocky Cheng walked around happy all the time. News that the Japanese were on their way to sack the village created a glut in dogshit in and around the village. Apparently the farmers who normally fought over it had grown lazy, for now it lay there waiting for him to come and claim it. He, too, walked out of the village as the roosters were crowing for the third time, running into Old Geng with his shotgun slung over his back. They greeted each other and parted ways. By the time the eastern sky had turned red, the pile of dogshit in Pocky Cheng’s basket was like a little mountain peak. He laid it down, stood on the southern edge of the village wall, and breathed in the cool, sweet morning air, until his throat itched. He cleared it loudly, then raised his voice to the rosy morning clouds and began to sing: ‘I am a thirsty grainstalk drinking up the morning dew -’
A shot rang out.
His battered, wingless felt hat sailed into the air. Tucking in his neck, he jumped into the ditch beneath the wall like a shot, bumping his head with a resounding thud against the frozen ground. Not sure if he was dead or alive, he tried moving his arms and legs. They were working, but barely. His crotch was all sticky. Fear raced through his heart. I’ve been hit, he thought. He sat up and stuck his hand down his pants. With his heart in his mouth, he pulled out his hand, expecting it to be all red. But it was covered with something yellow, and his nostrils twitched from the odour of rotten seedlings. He tried to rub the stuff off on the side of the ditch, but it stuck to his skin. He heard a shout from beyond the ditch: ‘Stand up!’
He looked up to see a man in his thirties with a flat, chiselled face, yellow skin, and a long, jutting chin. He was wearing a chestnut-coloured wool cap and brandishing a black pistol! A forest of yellow-clad legs was aligned behind him, the calves wrapped in wide, crisscrossed cloth leggings. His eyes travelled slowly upward past protruding hips, stopping at dozens of alien faces, all adorned with the smug smile of a man taking a comfortable shit. A Rising Sun flag drooped under the bright-red sunrise; onion-green rays glinted off a line of bayonets. Pocky Cheng’s stomach lurched, and his nervous guts relinquished their contents.
‘Get up here!’ Chestnut Wool Cap barked out angrily.
Pocky Cheng climbed out of the ditch. Not knowing what to say, he just bowed repeatedly.
Chestnut Wool Cap was twitching right under his nose. ‘Are there Nationalist troops in the village?’ he asked.
Pocky Cheng looked at him blankly.
A Japanese soldier waved a bloodstained bayonet in front of Pocky Cheng’s chest and face. He heard his stomach growl and felt his intestines writhe and twist slowly; at any other moment, he would have welcomed the intensely pleasant sensation of a bowel movement. The Japanese soldier shouted something and swung the bayonet, slicing Pocky Cheng’s padded jacket down the middle and freeing the cotton wadding inside. The sharp pain of parted skin and sliced muscles leaped from his rib cage. He doubled over, all the foul liquids in his body seeming to pour out at once.
He looked imploringly into the enraged Japanese face and began to wail.
Chestnut Wool Cap drove the barrel of his pistol into his forehead. ‘Stop blubbering! The commander asked you a question! What village is this? Is it Saltwater Gap?’
He nodded, trying hard to control his sobs.
‘Is there a man in the village who makes straw sandals?’ Chestnut Wool Cap softened his tone a little.
Ignoring his pain, he eagerly and ingratiatingly replied, ‘Yes yes yes.’
‘Did he take his straw sandals to market day in Gaomi yesterday?’
‘Yes yes yes,’ he jabbered. Warm blood had slithered down from his chest to his belly.
‘How about pickles?’
‘I don’t know… don’t think so…’
Chestnut Wool Cap slapped him across the mouth and shouted: ‘Tell me! I want to know about pickles!’
‘Yes yes yes, your honour,’ he muttered obsequiously. ‘Commander, every family has pickles, you can find them in every pickle vat in the village.’
‘Stop acting like a fucking idiot. I want to know if there’s somebody called Pickles!’ Chestnut Wool Cap slapped him across the face, over and over.
‘Yes… no… yes… no… Your honour… don’t hit me… Please don’t hit me… your honour…’ he mumbled, reeling from the slaps.
The Japanese said something. Chestnut Wool Cap swept the hat off his head and bowed, then turned back, the smile on his face gone in an instant. He shoved Pocky Cheng and said with a scowl, ‘We want to see all the sandal makers in the village. You lead the way.’
Concerned about the dung basket he’d left on the wall, Pocky Cheng instinctively cocked his head in that direction. A bayonet that shone like snow flashed past his cheek. Quickly concluding that his life was worth more than a dung basket and spade, he turned his head back and set out for the village on his bandy legs. Dozens of Japs fell in behind him, their leather boots crunching across the frost-covered grass. A few grey dogs barked tentatively.
I’m really in a fix this time, Pocky Cheng was thinking. No one else went out to collect dogshit, no one but me, and I ran into some real dogshit luck. The fact that the Japanese didn’t appreciate his good-citizen attitude frustrated him. He led them quickly to each of the sandal makers’ cellars. Whoever Pickle was, he was sure in one now. Pocky Cheng looked off into the distance towards his house, where green smoke curled into the sky from the
