bundle. After pinching the dry, withered tips and bulb ends of the stalks, leaving only the fresh-green middle parts, he rolled six of them into one of the flatcakes and handed it to Jinju.
She shook her head, for she was still immersed in the joyful feelings of a moment before and wanted to hold them for as long as possible. The pungent smell of garlic put her on edge-over time she had grown to hate its smell.
“Eat something, so we can get moving again,” Gao Ma said.
Reluctantly she took the rolled flatcake, but waited until he had begun eating his before taking her first tentative bite. The thin cake was hard and resistant as a frozen rag. Gao Mas jaw was grinding, his cheeks twitching, and she heard the raw, cold garlic crunch sickeningly in his mouth. She bit down on her garlic, which cracked coldly, like bamboo being sliced by a knife. Her mouth filled with saliva; but her heart, now raw and cold, puckered inside her.
Gao Ma wolfed down his food, grunting raspily as he chewed. He farted loudly. Turning her face away in disgust, she tossed her rolled flatcake back into the blue bundle, where it spread open to reveal its garlicky contents.
“What’s wrong?” he asked anxiously, a string of garlic fiber caught between his teeth.
“Nothing. You eat,” she answered softly. His garlicky breath again made her aware of the gap between them.
Once he had finished off his own flatcake, Gao Ma reached into the bundle and took hers out. “You don’t have to eat this if you don’t want to,” he said as he rerolled it. “I’ll buy you something more edible when we reach Pale Horse Township.”
“Where are we going, Gao Ma?”
“When we reach Pale Horse Township we’ll take a bus to Lanji and catch a train for the Northeast, I’m sure your brothers and the rest of them are waiting for us at Paradise Station.” His voice took on a sinister tone as he continued: “We’ll make sure their scheme fails.”
“What will we do in the Northeast?” she asked, somewhat dazed.
“We’ll go to Magnolia County in Heilongjiang. One of my army comrades is the deputy county administrator. He can help us find work,” Gao Ma said, showing he’d thought things out. He turned his attention to the second rolled cake, which he began eating as he released another resounding fart.
She giggled, even though she didn’t know what was so funny.
Gao Ma blushed. “I’ve lived alone too long,” he said bashfully. “Don’t laugh at me.”
Immediately forgiving, she said as if talking to a child, “You’re no different than other people. Anyone who eats grain knows what it’s like to pass wind.”
“Even women? I can’t imagine a pretty thing like you farting.”
“Women are human, too,” she said.
The mist on the jute bushes evaporated. Off to the north, somewhere in the wildwoods, a donkey brayed loudly.
“We can’t travel in broad daylight, can we?” she asked.
“Sure we can, since that’s the last thing they’d expect us to do. We’re about ten miles from Pale Horse, a three-hour walk. By the time your brothers get around to following us there, we’ll already be in Lanji.”
“I don’t want to go,” Jinju protested. “I belong to you now, so my folks might change their minds and let us be together.”
“Stop dreaming, Jinju,” Gao Ma said. “You’d be lucky if they didn’t beat you to death.”
“My mother loves me…” There were tears in her eyes.
“Loves you? She loves your brothers and uses you as a pawn to get them married. Spending the rest of your life with Liu Shengli, is that what you want? Use your head, Jinju, and come with me. My army comrade is a deputy county administrator. Do you hear what I’m saying? A
“Gao Ma, I’ve given you everything I have. If you call, I’ll come running, just like a dog.
“Jinju,” he said, draping his arm around her shoulder, “I’ll make sure you have a decent life, even if I have to sell my blood to do it.”
“Elder Brother, why don’t we just wrap our arms around each other and end it all here? Kill me first.”
“No, Jinju, we’re not going to die. We’ll make it, and we’ll give your parents something to think about.”
Seeing the cruel determination in her lover’s eyes, she touched the scab on his forehead with her fingertips. “Does it still hurt?” she asked tenderly.
“It hurts here.” He grabbed her hand and placed it over his heart.
She rested her head on his chest. “You’ve suffered because of me. My brothers are heartless wolves.”
“You don’t have to talk about them like that,” Gao Ma objected magnanimously. “Life’s not easy for them, either.
“Remember that day last year?” he continued expressively. “You know, when I was helping you in the field and told you I was going to get some fresh batteries for my cassette recorder so you could listen to it? Well, I finally did it. Here, listen to this.” He took the cassette recorder out of his bundle, pushed the play button, and the scratchy sound of a woman’s voice came spilling out: “Moonlight on the fifteenth cascading down on my old home and on frontier passes / In the silent night he longs for someone, and so do I.”
“It’s a new tape by Dong Wenhua,” Gao Ma said. “She’s in the army, the Shenyang Military District. Short, chubby, real cute.”
“You’ve seen her?”
“Only on TV,” he admitted. “Sun Baojia has a new color set. His family planted six acres of garlic this year and sold it for over five thousand yuan. If we weren’t in such a fix, I’d stay home and make a killing on garlic, since this county is going to let us plant even more acreage next year.”
He plugged the earphones into the recorder, cutting out the speaker, to Jinju’s bewilderment. Then he placed the earphones over her head. “It sounds better this way,” he said loudly.
She watched him take an envelope filled with ten-yuan bills out of his bundle.
“I sold off everything I could. My neighbor Yu Qiushui promised to watch my house Maybe we can come back after a few years in the Northeast.”
She was listening to the woman’s loud singing through the headphones: “Ali Baba, hai! Ali Baba, hai! Ali Baba is a happy young man!”
CHAPTER 7
– from a ballad sung by Zhang Kou to garlic farmers
1.
Gao Yang was put into a large makeshift lockup in the county station house. At first he didn’t know where he was, but the double-paneled red gate had stuck in his mind, for it was the same gate he had passed when he came to town to sell his garlic; he remembered the ditch that served as a sort of moat. The water, filthy to begin with,
