Life and Death are Wearing Me Out (6 page)

In the early morning, Mo Yan’s father ran anxiously up to the house and, when he saw my master, began wiping his tear-filled eyes with his sleeve, not saying a word. My master and his wife were eating breakfast at the moment, but they put down their bowls at the sight that greeted them and asked: What’s happened, good uncle? In the midst of his sobs, Mo Yan’s father managed to say: The baby, she had the baby, a boy. Are you saying that Aunty has had a baby boy? my master’s wife asked. Yes, Mo Yan’s father said. Then why are you crying? my master asked. You should be happy. Mo Yan’s father just stared at my master. Who says I’m not? If I wasn’t happy, why would I be crying? My master laughed. Yes, he said, of course, you’re crying because you’re happy. Why else would you cry? Break out the liquor, he said to his wife. We are going to celebrate. None for me today, Mo Yan’s father begged off. I have to spread the good news to lots of people. We can celebrate another day Yingchun, Mo Yan’s father said as he bowed deeply to my master’s wife. I have you and your Deer Placenta Ointment to thank for this. The boy’s mother said she’ll bring him to show you after her month of lying in. We’ll both kowtow to you. She said you have stored up such good fortune that she wants the boy to be your nominal son, and if you say no, I’m to get down on my knees and plead. My master’s wife said: You two are cutups. I’m happy to do it. There’s no need for you to get down on your knees. — And so, Mo Yan isn’t only your friend, nominally, he’s your brother.

Your brother Mo Yan’s father had no sooner left the house than things started heating up in the Ximen estate compound — or should I say the village government office compound. First, Hong Taiyue and Huang Tong pasted up a pair of couplets on the main gate. Then the musicians filed in, crouched down in the yard, and waited. These men looked familiar to me somehow. Ximen Nao’s memory seemed to be returning, but fortunately my master came in with the feed and brought an end to my recollections. Thanks to the opening in my lean-to, I was able to watch the goings-on outside as I ate. At about mid-morning, a teenage boy came running into the yard carrying a little flag made of red paper.

“He’s coming!” he shouted. “The village chief wants you to start!”

The musicians scrambled to their feet, and in no time, drums banged, gongs clanged, followed by blaring and tooting wind instruments welcoming the honored guest. I watched as Huang Tong ran around shouting, “Out of my way, make room, the district chief is here!”

Under the leadership of Hong Taiyue, head of the co-op, District Chief Chen and several of his armed bodyguards strode in through the gate. The lean district chief, with his deep sunken eyes, swayed as he walked; he was wearing an old army uniform. Farmers who had joined the co-op swarmed in after him, leading their livestock, all draped in red bunting, and carrying farm tools over their shoulders. Within minutes, the yard was filled with farm animals and the bobbing heads of their owners, bringing the place alive. The district chief stood on a stool beneath the apricot tree and waved to the massed crowd. His gestures were received with shouted greetings, and even the animals were caught up in the celebration: horses whinnied, donkeys brayed, cows mooed, increasing the happy clamor and adding fuel to the joyous fire. In the midst of all that noise and activity, but before the district chief had begun his speech, my master led me — or should I say, Lan Lian led his young donkey — through the crowd, under the gaze of the people and their animals, right out through the gate.

Once out of the compound, we headed south, and as we passed the elementary school playground, by Lotus Bay we saw all the bad elements, moving rocks and dirt under the supervision of two militiamen armed with rifles adorned with red tassels; they were building up an earthen platform north of the playground, the place where operas had been performed, where mass criticism meetings had been held, and where I, Ximen Nao, had stood when I was being struggled against. Deep in Ximen Nao’s memory lay the recognition of all these men. Look there, that skinny old man whose knees are nearly buckling from the weight of the big rock he’s carrying, that’s Yu Wufu, who was head of security for three months. And look there, that fellow carrying two baskets of earth on a carrying pole, that’s Zhang Dazhuang, who went over to the enemy, taking a rifle with him, when the Landlords’ Restitution Corps launched an attack to settle scores. He was a carter for my family for five years. My wife, Ximen Bai, arranged his marriage with Bai Susu, her niece. When I was being struggled against, they said that I slept with Bai Susu the night before she was married to Zhang Dazhuang, which was a barefaced lie, a damned rumor; but when they called her up as a witness, she covered her face with her jacket, wailed tearfully, and said nothing, thus turning a lie into the truth and sending Ximen Nao straight down to the Yellow Springs of Death. Look over there at the young man with the oval face and slanty eyebrows, the one who’s carrying that green locust log; that’s Wu Yuan, one of our rich peasants, and a dear friend of mine. He’s quite a musician, plays both the two-stringed
erhu
and the
suona.
During off seasons on the farm, he played with the local band as they walked through town, not for money but for the sheer pleasure of it. And then there’s that fellow with a few scraggly hairs on his chin, the one with the worn-out hoe over his shoulder who’s standing on the platform dawdling and trying to look busy; it’s Tian Gui, the onetime manager of a flourishing liquor business, a skinflint who kept ten hectoliters of wheat in his grain bins but made his wife and kids eat chaff and rotten vegetables. Look, look, look, that woman with the bound feet carrying half a basket of dirt but having to stop and rest every four or five steps, that’s my formal wife, Ximen Bai. And look there, behind her, it’s Yang Qi, the village public security head, a cigarette dangling from his lips and a willow switch in his hand. Quit loafing and get to work, Ximen Bai, he snarls. She is so alarmed she nearly falls, and the heavy basket of dirt lands on her tiny feet. She shrieks, my wife does, then cries softly from the pain, and begins to sob, like a little girl. Yang Qi raises his switch and brings it down hard — I pulled the rope out of Lan Lian’s hand and ran at Yang Qi — the switch snapped in the air a mere inch from Ximen Bai’s nose, didn’t touch her, showing what an expert the man is. The thieving, depraved bastard — a gluttonous, hard-drinking, whoremongering, chain-smoking gambler — squandered what his father left him, made his mother’s life such a misery that she hanged herself from a roof beam, and here he was, a redder-than-red poor peasant, a frontline revolutionary. I was going to drive a fist right into his face — actually, I don’t have a fist, so I’d have had to kick him or bite him with my big donkey teeth. Yang Qi, you bastard, with your scraggly chin hairs and dangling cigarette and willow switch, one of these days, I, Ximen Donkey, am going to take a big bite out of you.

My master jerked me back by the rope, saving that gangster Yang Qi from a bad ending. So I raised up and kicked with my hind legs, striking something soft — Yang Qi’s belly. Since becoming a donkey, I’ve been able to take in a lot more with my eyes than Ximen Nao ever could — I can see what goes on behind me. I watched as that bastard Yang Qi hit the ground hard, and I saw his face turn ashen. It took him a long moment to catch his breath, and when he did he called out for his mother. You bastard, your mother hanged herself because of you! Calling for her won’t do you any good!

My master threw down the rope and rushed over to help Yang Qi up. Back on his feet, Yang picked up the switch to hit me over the head, but my master grabbed his wrist. “I’m the only person who can do that, Yang Qi,” my master said. “Fuck you, Lan Lian!” Yang Qi roared. “You, with your cozy relationship with Ximen Nao, are a bad element who’s wormed his way into the class ranks. I’ll use this switch on you too!” But my master tightened his grip on the man’s wrist, drawing yelps of pain from someone who had abused his body by bedding all the loose women in town; finally he let the switch fall to the ground. With a shove that sent Yang stumbling backward, my master said, “Consider yourself lucky my donkey doesn’t have iron shoes yet.”

My master turned and led me out through the southern gate, where yellowing bristlegrass atop the wall swayed in the wind. That was the local co-op’s first day, and the day I reached adulthood. “Donkey,” my master said, “today I’m going to have you shod to protect you from stones in the road and keep sharp objects from cutting your hooves. It’ll make you an adult, and I can put you to work.” Every donkey’s fate, I surmised. So I raised my head and brayed,
Hee-haw, hee-haw
— It was the first time I’d actually made the sound aloud, so loud and crisp my startled master beamed.

The local blacksmith was a master at making shoes for horses and donkeys. He had a black face, a red nose, and beetle brows without a hair on them; there were no lashes above his red, puffy eyes, but three deep worry wrinkles across his forehead, repositories for coal ash. His apprentice’s face, as I could see, was pale under a mass of lines created by runnels of sweat. There was so much sweat running down the boy’s body, I worried that he was about to dry up. As for the blacksmith himself, his skin was so parched it looked like years of high heat had baked all the water out of it. The boy was operating a bellows with his left hand and wielding a pair of fire tongs with his right. He removed steel from the forge when it was white-hot, then he and the blacksmith hammered it into the desired shape, first with a sledge, then a finishing hammer. The
bang-bang, clang-clang
sound bouncing off the walls and the flying sparks had me spellbound.

The pale, handsome boy should have been on the stage, winning over pretty girls with sweet talk and tender words of love, not hammering steel in a blacksmith shop. But I was impressed by his strength, watching as he wielded an eighteen-pound sledge that I’d thought only the bull-like blacksmith could manage with such ease; it was like an extension of the boy’s young body. The hot steel was like a lump of clay waiting to be turned into whatever the blacksmith and his apprentice desired. After hammering a pillow-sized clump of steel into a straw cutter, a farmer’s biggest hand tool, they stopped to rest. “Master Jin,” my master said to the blacksmith, “I’d like to enlist your services to make a set of shoes for my donkey.” The blacksmith took a deep drag on his cigarette and blew the smoke out through his nose and his ears. His apprentice was gulping water out of a large, coarse china bowl. The water, it seemed, turned immediately to sweat, giving off a peculiar smell that was the essential odor of the handsome, innocent, hardworking boy’s being. “That’s some white-hoofed donkey,” the old blacksmith said with a sigh. Where I was standing, just outside the tent, not far from the road that led to the county town, I looked down and saw my snow-white hooves for the first time.

The boy put down his bowl. “They’ve got two new hundred-horsepower East Is Red tractors over at the state-run farm, each one as powerful as a hundred horses. They attached a steel cable to a poplar tree so big it takes two people to wrap their arms around it, hooked it to one of those tractors, and it yanked the tree right out of the ground, roots and all. Those roots were half a block long.” “You know everything, don’t you!” the old blacksmith scolded the boy. Then he turned to my master. “Old Lan,” he said, “it may only be a donkey, but it looks like you’ve got a good one. Who knows, some high official might get tired of riding a fine horse one day and decide it’s time to ride a donkey. When that day comes, Lan Lian, donkey luck will be yours for the asking.” The boy smirked at that, then burst out laughing. He stopped laughing as abruptly as he’d started, as if the laughter and the expression that flashed onto his face and immediately vanished were private business. The old blacksmith was clearly shocked by the boy’s bizarre laughter. “Jin Bian,” he said after a moment, “do we have any horseshoes?” As if he’d been waiting for the question, Jin Bian replied, “We have a lot, but all for horses. We can put them into the forge, heat them up, and change them into donkey shoes.” And that is what they did. In the time it takes to smoke a pipe, they had turned four horseshoes into four donkey shoes. Then the boy moved a stool outside and put it on the ground behind me, so the old blacksmith could lift up my legs and trim my hooves with a pair of sharp shears. When he was finished, he stepped back to look me over. Again he sighed, this time with deep emotion. “This really is a fine donkey,” the blacksmith said. “It’s the best looking one I’ve ever seen!” “No matter how good-looking he is, he’s no match for one of those combines. The state-run farm imported a bright red one from the Soviet Union. It can harvest a row of wheat in the blink of an eye. It gobbles up the wheat stalks in front and shoots the kernels out the back. In five minutes you’ve got a bagful.” All this the boy said with breathless admiration. The old blacksmith sighed. “Jin Bian,” he said, “it sounds like I won’t be able to keep you here for long. But even if you leave tomorrow, today we’ve got to shoe this donkey.” Jin Bian came up alongside me and lifted one of my legs, hammer in hand and mouth full of nails. He fitted a shoe on my hoof with one hand and hammered it on with the other, two strokes per nail, never missing a beat. One down. All four shoes took him less than twenty minutes. When he finished, he threw down his hammer and walked back inside the tent. “Lan Lian,” the blacksmith said, “walk him a bit to see if there’s a limp.” So my master started me walking, from the supply and marketing co-op over to the butcher shop, where they were just then butchering a black pig. White knife in, red knife out, a terrifying sight. The butcher was wearing an emerald green old-style jacket, and the contrast with the red was eye-popping. We left the butcher shop and walked to the District Government Office, where we met with District Chief Chen and his bodyguard. The opening-day ceremony for the Ximen Village Farming Co-op must have ended. The district chief’s bicycle was broken; his guard was carrying it over his shoulder. One look from District Chief Chen and he couldn’t keep his eyes off me. How good-looking and powerful I must have been to catch his attention like that! I knew I was an intimidating donkey among donkeys; maybe Lord Yama had given me the finest donkey legs and the cream of donkey heads out of an obligation to Ximen Nao. “That’s a wonderful donkey,” I heard Chief Chen say. “His hooves look like they’re stepping in snow. He’d be perfect at the livestock work station as a stud.” I heard his bicycle-toting guard ask my master, “Are you Lan Lian from Ximen Village?” “Yes,” my master replied as he slapped me on the rump to get me moving faster. But Chief Chen stopped us and patted me on the back. I reared up. “He’s got a temper,” he said. “You’ll have to work on that. You can’t work with an animal that’s easily spooked. An animal like that is hard to train.” Then, in the tone of an old hand, he said, “Before I joined the revolution, I was a trader in donkeys. I’ve seen thousands of them, I know them like the palm of my hand, especially their temperament.” He laughed long and loud; my master laughed along with him, fatuously. “Lan Lian,” the chief said, “Hong Taiyue told me what happened, and I wasn’t happy with him. I told him that Lan Lian is one tough donkey, and you have to rub him with the grain. Don’t be impatient with him, or he might kick or bite you. I tell you, Lan Lian, you don’t have to join the co-op right away. See if you can compete with it. I know you were allotted eight acres of land, so see how much grain you harvest per acre next fall. Then check to see how much the co-op brings in. If you do better, you can keep working your land on your own. But if the co-op does better, you and I will have another talk.” “You said that,” my master said excitedly. “Don’t forget.” “Yes, I said it, you’ve got witnesses,” the district chief said, pointing to his bodyguard and the people who had gathered around us. My master led me back to the blacksmith shop, where he said, “He doesn’t limp at all. Every step was perfect. I’d never have believed that someone as young as your apprentice could do such an excellent job.” With a wry smile, the blacksmith shook his head, as if weighed down with concerns. Then I spotted the young blacksmith Jin Bian, a bedroll over his shoulder — the corners of a gray blanket sticking out from under a dog-skin wrapping — walking out of the shop. “Well, I’ll be leaving, Master,” he said. “Go ahead,” the old blacksmith replied sadly. “Go seek your glorious future!”