her share of the garlic at her age? Number One, why not add her share to yours, and you sell it at the market, then divide the profits?”
“Director, with this leg of mine
Okay, then, how about you, Number Two?”
“If he won’t do it, I’ll be damned if I will!”
“This is your mother we’re talking about, not some total stranger.”
“I don’t need their help. I’ll sell it myself!” Fourth Aunt proclaimed.
“That settles it,” Number Two said.
“Anything else?” Gao Jinjiao asked.
Number One said, “I recall he had a new jacket.”
“Nothing gets past you, does it, you little bastard?” Fourth Aunt snapped at her son. ‘That jacket’s for me.”
“Remember the saying,” Number One protested. “ ‘Father’s jacket, Mother’s bindings, next generation riches finding.’ Why do you want to keep his jacket?”
“Since we’re dividing things up, let’s do it right,” Number Two remarked.
“Majority rules,” Gao Jinjiao declared. “You’d better bring it out, Fourth Aunt.”
She opened the beat-up old chest and took out the jacket.
“Brother,” Number One said, “now that we’ve divided up all the family property, my bachelorhood is settled once and for all. Since you can easily find a wife, I should get the jacket.”
“Dear Brother,” Number Two replied, “I can eat shit, I just don’t like the taste. Since we’re dividing the family property, we have to be fair. No one should do better than anyone else.”
One jacket, and both of you want it,” Gao Jinjiao commented. “Any ideas? Except for cutting it in two, that is.”
“Then cut it in two if that’s the only way,” Number Two demanded. Picking the jacket up, he draped it over a wood stump, went inside for his cleaver, and split the jacket right down the middle seam, as Fourth Aunt looked on and cried her eyes out. Then, gritting his teeth with the fire of determination in his eyes, he picked up the two* halves and tossed one to his brother. “Half for you and half for me,” he said. “We’re even.”
A sneering Jinju picked up a pair of worn-out shoes. “These were Father’s. One for you and one for you!”-and she flung a single shoe at each of her brothers.
CHAPTER 16
– from a ballad by Zhang Kou sung after being touched on the mouth with a policeman’s electric prod. The incident occurred in a tiny lane around the corner from the county government compound on the twenty-ninth of May, 1987
1.
A jailer led him down the long corridor while another walked behind him to the right, pressing a rifle muzzle up against his ribs. An identical gray metal door with an identical small opening fronted each cell, the only differences being the Arabic numbers above the doors and the faces looking out through the tiny openings. They were bloated, grotesquely enlarged, the faces of living ghosts. He shuddered. Every step was torture. Behind one of the windows a female convict giggled. “Jailer, here’s twenty cents, buy me some sanitary napkins, okay?” The jailer responded with an angry curse: “Slut!” But when Gao Yang turned to see what the woman looked like, he felt a nudge from the rifle. “Keep moving!”
Reaching the end of the corridor, they passed through a steel door and climbed a narrow, rickety staircase. The jailer’s leather shoes clacked loudly on the wooden steps, while the slaps of Gao Yang’s bare feet were barely audible. The warm, dry wood felt so much better on his feet than the damp, slippery concrete corridor floor. Up and up he climbed, with no end in sight; he was soon panting, and as the staircase wound steeply round, he began to get dizzy. If not for the jailer behind him, silently nudging him along with his rifle, he’d have lain down like a dying dog, spread out over as many steps as were required to support him. His injured ankle throbbed like a pulsating heart; the surrounding skin was so puffy his anklebone all but disappeared. It burned and ached. Old man in heaven, please don’t let it get infected, he uttered in silent prayer. Would that aristocratic woman be willing to lance it and release the pus? That thought reminded him of how she had smelled.
A large room with a wooden floor painted red. White plaster shows through the peeling green paint on the walls. Bright daylight shines down from the ceiling on four crackling electric prods. Desks line the northern wall. A male and two female jailers sit behind the desks. One of the women has a face like a persimmon fresh from the garden. He recognizes the words painted on the wall behind them.
A jailer orders him to sit on the floor, for which he is immensely grateful. He is then told to stretch his legs out in front and rest his manacled hands on his knees. He does as he’s told.
“Is your name Gao Yang?”
“Yes.”
“Age?”
“Forty-one.”
“Occupation?”
“Farmer.”
“Family background?”
“Urn… my, uh, parents were landlords…”
“Are you familiar with government policy?”
“Yes. Leniency to those who confess, severity to those who refuse to do so. Not coming clean brings severe punishment.”
“Good. Now tell us about your criminal activities of May twenty-eighth.”
2.
Dark clouds filled the sky on May 28 as Gao Yang drove his donkey; it was scrawnier than ever, after exhausting itself day after day lugging eighty bundles of wilting garlic to town so Gao Yang could try his luck again. Nine days since Fourth Uncle had met his tragic end, but it seemed like an eternity. During that period Gao Yang had made four trips to town, selling fifty bundles of garlic for a total of a hundred twenty yuan, minus eighteen yuan for the various fees and taxes, which left him a profit of one hundred and two. The eighty bundles he was hauling now should have been sold two days earlier at a purchasing station set up north of the tracks by the South Counties Supply and Marketing Cooperative, which was buying garlic at fifty fen a pound. But just as Gao Yang reached the scales with his load, a gang of men in gray uniforms and wide-brimmed hats showed up, led by Wang Tai.
