Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused – Fiction From Today (25 page)

The scene on the second morning was much the way it had been on the first. The punishment expert lay prone upon his bed staring anxiously toward the stranger as he pushed open the door to the bedroom. In order to hide his sense of shame and humiliation, the punishment expert once again pushed aside his quilt to reveal that he had not only wet the bed but had also soiled it with a pile of his own shit. But the experiment had progressed in much the same manner as the night before-he had woken up at the last moment. In a voice tinged with sorrow, he said, "Come back tomorrow. I promise that I'll be dead by tomorrow."

The stranger failed to give these parting words his full attention. He gazed with pity upon the punishment expert, feeling as if he should tell him about the flaw. The flaw was simply this: after ten hours, a bullet should appear, a bullet that would shatter the punishment expert's head. The punishment expert had spent ten years perfecting the ten-hour process that would lead to his own death but had neglected to include the bullet with which the episode must inevitably culminate. At the same time, however, the stranger was all too aware of the danger of such a revelation. His past would die along with the punishment expert. And he sensed that as long as he was with the punishment expert, his past was never far away. He left the room without having revealed his secret, secure in the knowledge that the flaw would ensure that his past was not lost.

On the third morning, however, the stranger found an entirely different scene when he pushed open the door to the punishment expert's bedroom. The old man had fulfilled his promise of the day before: the punishment expert was dead. He hadn't died on the bed. Instead, his body hung from a rope about a yard away from the bed.

Confronted by this reality, the stranger felt a withered clump of weeds begin to entangle his heart. The punishment expert's death forever precluded the possibility of any kind of connection with the four memories he had once sought. To gaze upon the punishment expert now was to see the lynching of his own past. He distantly recalled March 5, 1965. And at that very same moment, he remembered the punishment expert's fury when he had spoken of death by hanging. The punishment expert had finally chosen to take his own life by means of a degraded punishment.

It wasn't until he left the room much later that he discovered a note written on the back of the door:

I HAVE REDEEMED THIS PUNISHMENT.

The punishment expert had clearly been lucid and sober as he wrote this message, for he had concluded by carefully noting the date: "March 5, 1965."

Translated by Andrew F. Jones

That afternoon, the armed work detachment posted a notice on the whitewashed wall of Ma Kuisan's home, which faced the street; it announced the following morning's executions at the usual place: the southern bridgehead of the Jiao River. All able-bodied villagers were to turn out for educational purposes. There were so many executions that year that people had lost interest in them, and the only way to draw a crowd was to make attendance mandatory.

The room was still pitch-black when Father got up to light the bean-oil lamp. After putting on his lined jacket, he woke me up and tried to get me out of bed, but it was so cold all I wanted to do was stay under the warm covers-which Father finally pulled back. "Get up," he said. "The armed work detachment likes to get their business over with early. If we're late, we'll miss our chance."

I followed Father out the gate. The eastern sky was growing light. The streets were icy cold and deserted; winds from the northwest had swept the dust clean during the night; and the gray roadway was clearly visible. My fingers and toes were so cold it felt as if they were being chewed by a cat. As we passed the Ma family compound, where the armed work detachment was quartered, we noticed a light in the window and heard the sound of a bellows. Father said softly, "Step it up. The work detachment is getting breakfast."

Father dragged me up to the top of the riverbank; from there, we could see the dark outline of the stone bridge and patches of ice in the hollows of the riverbed. I asked, "Where are we going to hide, Father?"

"Under the bridge."

It was deserted under the bridge and pitch-black, not to mention freezing cold. My scalp tingled, so I asked Father, "How come my scalp is tingling?"

"Mine, too," he said. "They've shot so many people here that the ghosts of the wronged are everywhere."

I detected the movement of furry creatures in the darkness under the bridge. "There they are!" I shouted.

"Those aren't wronged ghosts," Father said. "They're dogs that feed on the dead."

I shrank back until I bumped into the bone-chilling cold of a bridge piling. All I could think about was Grandma, whose eyes were so clouded over with cataracts she was all but blind. The sky would be completely light once the cold glare from the three western stars slanted into the space under the bridge. Father lit his pipe; the fragrant smell of tobacco quickly enveloped us. My lips were turning numb. "Father, can I go out and run around? I'm freezing."

Father's reply was "Grate your teeth. The armed work detachment shoots their prisoners when the morning sun is still red."

"Who are they shooting this morning, Father?"

"I don't know," Father said. "But we'll find out soon enough. I hope they shoot some young ones."

"Why?"

"Young people have young bodies. Better results."

There was more I wanted to ask, but Father was already losing his patience. "No more questions. Everything we say down here can be heard up there."

While we were talking, the sky turned fish-belly white. The village dogs had formed a pack and were barking loudly, but they couldn't drown out the wailing sounds of women. Father emerged from our hiding spot and stood for a moment in the riverbed, cocking his ear in the direction of the village. Now I was really getting nervous. The scavenger dogs prowling the space under the bridge were glaring at me as if they wanted to tear me limb from limb I don't know what kept me from getting out of there as fast as I could. Father returned at a crouch. I saw his lips quiver in the dim light of dawn but couldn't tell if he was cold or scared. "Did you hear anything?" I asked.

"Keep quiet," Father whispered. "They'll be here soon. I could hear them tying up the condemned."

I moved up close to Father and sat down on a clump of weeds. By listening carefully, I could hear a gong in the village, mixed in with a man's raspy voice: "Villagers-go to the southern bridgehead to watch the execution-shoot the tyrannical landlord Ma Kuisan-his wife-puppet village head Luan Fengshan-orders of armed work detachment Chief Zhang-those who don't go will be punished as collaborators."

I heard Father grumble softly, "Why are they doing this to Ma Kuisan? Why shoot him? He's the last person they should shoot."

I wanted to ask Father why they shouldn't shoot Ma Kuisan, but before I could open my mouth, I heard the crack of a rifle, and a bullet went whizzing far off, way up into the sky somewhere. Then came the sound of horsehoofs heading our way, all the way up to the bridgehead; when they hit the flooring, they clattered like a passing whirlwind. Father and I shrank back and looked at the slivers of sunlight filtering down through cracks between the stones; we were both frightened and not quite sure just what was happening. After about half the time it takes to smoke a pipeful, we heard people coming toward us, shouting and clamoring. They stopped. I heard a man whose voice sounded like a duck's quack: "Let him go, damn it. We'll never catch him."

Whoever it was fired a couple of shots in the direction of the hoofbeats. The sound echoed off the walls where we were hiding; my ears rang, and there was a strong smell of gunpowder.

Again the quack: "What the fuck are you shooting at? By now, he's in the next county."

"I never thought he'd do anything like that," someone else said. "Chief Zhang, he must be a farmhand."

"He's a paid running dog of the landlord class, if you ask me," the duck quacked.

Someone walked to the railing and started pissing over the side of the bridge. The smell was rank and overpowering.

"Come on, let's head back," the duck quacked. "We've got an execution to attend to."

Father whispered to me that the man who sounded like a duck was the chief of the armed work detachment, given the added responsibility by the district government of rooting out traitors to the Party; he was referred to as Chief Zhang.

The sky was starting to turn pink on the eastern horizon, where thin, low-hanging clouds slowly came into view, before long, they, too, were pink. Now it was light enough to make out some frozen dog turds on the ground of our hiding place, that and some shredded clothing, clumps of hair, and a chewed-up human skull. It was so repulsive I had to look away. The riverbed was as dry as a bone except for an ice-covered puddle here and there; clumps of dew-specked weeds stood on the sloped edges. The northern winds had died out; trees on the embankments stood stiff and still in the freezing air. I turned to look at Father; I could see his breath. Time seemed to stand still. Then Father said, "Here they come."

The arrival of the execution party at the bridgehead was announced by the frantic beating of a gong and muted footsteps. Then a booming voice rang out: "Chief Zhang, Chief Zhang, I've been a good man all my life…"

Father whispered, "That's Ma Kuisan."

Another voice, this one flat and cracking with emotion: "Chief Zhang, be merciful… We drew lots to see who would be village head; I didn't want the job… We drew lots; I got the short straw-my bad luck… Chief Zhang, be merciful, and spare my dog life… I've got an eighty-year-old mother at home I have to take care of…"

Father whispered, "That's Luan Fengshan."

After that, a high-pitched voice said, "Chief Zhang, when you moved into our home, I fed you well and gave you the best wine we had. I even let our eighteen-year-old daughter look after your needs. Chief Zhang, you don't have a heart of steel, do you?"

Father said, "That's Ma Kuisan's wife."

Finally, I heard a woman bellow "Wu-la-ah-ya-"

Father whispered, "That's Luan Fengshan's wife, the mute."

In a calm, casual tone, Chief Zhang said, "We're going to shoot you whether you make a fuss or not, so you might as well stop all that shouting. Everybody has to die sometime. You might as well get it over with early so you can come back as somebody else."

That's when Ma Kuisan announced loudly to the crowd, "All you folks, young and old, I, Ma Kuisan, have never done you any harm. Now I'm asking you to speak up for me…"

Several people fell noisily to their knees and began to plead in desperation, "Be merciful, Chief Zhang. Let them live. They're honest folk, all of them…"

A youthful male voice shouted above the noise, "Chief Zhang, I say we make these four dog bastards get down on their hands right here on the bridge and kowtow to us a hundred times. Then we give them back their dog lives. What do you say?"

"That's some idea you've got there, Gao Renshan!" Chief Zhang replied menacingly. "Are you suggesting that I, Zhang Qude, am some sort of avenging monster? It sounds to me like you've been head of the militia long enough! Now get up, fellow villagers. It's too cold to be kneeling like that. The policy is clear. Nobody can save them now, so everybody get up."

"Fellow villagers, speak up for me-" Ma Kuisan pleaded. "No more dawdling," Chief Zhang cut him short. "It's time." "Clear out, make some room!" Several young men at the bridgehead, almost certainly members of the armed work detachment, were clearing the bridge of the kneeling citizens.

Then Ma Kuisan sent his pleas heavenward: "Old man in the sky, are you blind? Am I, Ma Kuisan, being repaid for a lifetime of good with a bullet in the head? Zhang Qude, you son of a bitch, you will not die in bed, count on it. You son of a bitch-"

"Get on with it!" Chief Zhang bellowed. "Or do you like to hear him spout his poison?"

Running footsteps crossed the bridge above us. Through cracks between the stones, I caught glimpses of the people.

"Kneel!" someone on the southern edge of the bridge demanded.

"Clear the way, everybody" came a shout from the northern edge.

Pow-pow-pow
-three shots rang out.

The explosions bored into my eardrums and made them throb until I thought I'd gone deaf. By then, the sun had climbed above the eastern horizon, rimmed by a blood-red halo that spread to clouds looking like canopies of gigantic fir trees. A large, bulky human form came tumbling slowly down from the bridge above, cloudlike in its shifting movements; then when it hit the icy ground below, it regained its natural heft and thudded to a stop. Crystalline threads of blood oozed from the head.

Panic and confusion at the northern bridgehead-it sounded to me like the frantic dispersal of villagers who had been forcibly mobilized as witnesses to the executions. It didn't sound as if the armed work detachment took out after the deserters.

Once again, footsteps rushed across the bridge from north to south, followed by the shout of "Kneel" at the southern bridgehead and "Clear the way" at the northern. Then three more shots-the body of Luan Fengshan, hatless and wearing a ragged padded coat, tumbled head over heels down the riverbank, first bumping into Ma Kuisan, then rolling off to the side.

After that, things were simplified considerably. A volley of shots preceded the sound and sight of two disheveled female corpses tumbling down, arms and legs flying, and crashing into the bodies of their menfolk.

I held tightly onto Father's arm, feeling something warm and wet up against my padded trousers.

At least a half dozen people were standing on the bridge directly overhead, and it seemed to me that their weight was pushing the rock flooring down on top of us. Their thunderous shouts were nearly deafening: "Shall we check out the bodies, Chief?"