Sandalwood Death (27 page)

“A good friend of the family, Wang Peiran, works as an assistant to one of the Jiaozhou yamen officials. He tells me that many strange incidents have occurred over the past few days, including men who have woken up in the morning to find that their queues have been cut off!”

Looks of incomprehension decorated all the faces around him. No one dared utter a word. Ears pricked, they waited for him to continue.

“The immediate effect has been light-headedness and a general weakness that spreads to their limbs. They then fall into a trance that nearly destroys their ability to speak. They have become blithering idiots, impervious to medical intervention, because they do not suffer from a physical malady.”

“I hope this won’t usher in a second Taiping Rebellion,” Young Master Wu said. “I’ve heard old people recall the time in the Xianfeng reign when the Taipings came north, how they first cut off queues, and then heads.”

“No, nothing like that,” Second Master said. “This time it’s German missionaries casting their secret spells, or so I heard.”

Scholar Qu had his doubts.

“What could they expect to accomplish by cutting off queues?” he asked.

“Don’t be such a naïve pedant,” Second Master replied, clearly annoyed. “Do you really think that’s what they are after, a bunch of queues? What they want is our souls! Why else would those particular symptoms appear in men who lost their queues? It’s a clear sign of losing their souls.”

“I still don’t quite understand, Second Master,” Scholar Qu said. “What good can it do the Germans to take all those souls?”

Second Master smirked in response.

“I think I know the answer,” Young Master Wu said. “It’s tied to the construction of the railway, isn’t it?”

“Our young Wu is nobody’s fool,” Second Master said. Then he lowered his voice and added in a mysterious tone, “What I am going to tell you now must remain here with us. The Germans bury men’s queues beneath the railroad tracks, one for each railroad tie. Every one of those queues represents a soul, and each soul represents a hale and hearty man. Here is something to think about: The trains are manufactured out of pig iron and weigh a ton. They neither drink nor eat, so how can they move across the land? And not just move, but move at an unthinkably high speed. What powers them? Think that over.”

The mind-numbing thought produced an eerie silence. The whistle of a teakettle out back pierced the men’s eardrums. Disaster loomed; they all felt it. Chills ran down their necks, touched, it seemed, by an invisible pair of scissors.

As anxiety over the safety of their queues gripped the men, the young clerk from the town dispensary, Qiusheng, scurried into the teashop as if flames were nipping at his heels.

“Proprietor Sun,” he said breathlessly, “bad news . . . my shopkeeper sent me to tell you . . . German engineers . . . making improper advances to your wife . . . shopkeeper says you have to hurry or something terrible could happen . . .”

The news stunned Sun Bing, who dropped the teakettle in his hand and sprayed hot water and steam all around him. But shock quickly turned to anger and a pulsing of hot blood through his veins. The patrons looked on as his scarred chin began to twitch and the peaceful, benign look on his face took wing and flew away, supplanted by a fiendish grimace. Using his right hand for leverage, he leaped over the counter and grabbed the date-wood club resting against the door before running out into the street.

The excited teashop customers were all abuzz; still reeling from the frightful news about pigtails, they had now been given a second dose of bad news, with Germans taking advantage of a Chinese woman, effectively transforming terror into anger. A storehouse of resentment had been building among local residents ever since the Germans had begun construction of the Jiaozhou-Jinan line, resentment that had spilled over into loathing. Courage that had long been hidden within the residents of Northeast Gaomi Township burst to the surface, and a sense of righteous indignation took hold in people’s hearts, erasing all concerns over their own physical safety. Sun Bing’s patrons fell in behind him, shouting loudly on the road to the marketplace.

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4

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The wind whistled past Sun Bing’s ears as he ran down the narrow street, the blood in his veins surging to his head, causing his eardrums to throb and hum and his eyes to glaze over. People along the way might as well have been made of paper the way they rocked back and forth as bursts of air emanating from his frantic passage hit them in waves. Distorted faces brushed past his shoulders. He saw a tight circle of people in the square in front of the Jishengtang Pharmacy and the Li Jin General Store. He could not see what they were looking at, but he heard his wife’s screams and curses and the bawling of his twins, Bao’er and Yun’er, coming from inside the circle. He roared like a lion, raised his club over his head, and leaped into the fray, the crowd parting to make room. What he saw was a pair of long-legged German engineers, their heads looking like wooden clappers, one in front and one in back, with their hands all over his wife. She was fighting off their grasp, but could not keep their hands away from top and bottom at the same time. The Germans’ soft pink hands, covered with fine hair, were all over her, like octopus tentacles; their green eyes seemed lit up with will-o’-the-wisps. Several Chinese lackeys stood off to the side clapping and shouting encouragement. Sun’s twins were rolling and crawling on the ground and sending up a heart-rending howl. Roaring like a wounded animal, Sun charged the man who was bent over fondling his wife’s crotch with both hands, his back to Sun, and brought the club—so heavy it felt like iron or steel—down on the back of his head, as if carried by a dark red burst of wind. A sickening crunch announced the meeting of the silver-gray, glossy, elongated head and the date-wood club, which vibrated in his hands. The German’s body jerked upward in a strange arc before going limp; his hands were still inside Little Peach’s pants as he fell over, taking her with him, and pinning her to the ground. Sun Bing saw a rivulet of blood flowing from the engineer’s head a brief moment before he smelled it. The next thing he saw was the almost demonic look on the face of the other German, who had been fondling his wife’s breasts, no longer the silly grin that had borne witness to the fun he was having. Sun tried to raise his club a second time to repeat the scene on the foreign devil who was fondling his wife, but his arms suddenly seemed paralyzed, and the club fell harmlessly to the ground. The fatal blow had used up all his strength. Yet out of the corner of his eye, he saw aligned behind him a small forest of raised weapons: carrying poles, hoes, shovels, brooms, but mainly fists. A deafening battle cry pounded his eardrums. Railway workers and the Chinese lackeys who had been looking on grabbed hold of the terrified engineer and carried him out of the way, stumbling past the angry mob and leaving the clubbed German at the mercy of the crowd.

After standing there nearly dumbstruck for a few moments, Sun Bing bent down and, with what little strength he could muster, pulled the still-twitching German engineer off of his wife. The man’s hands seemed to have taken root in her pants; his blood was smeared all over her back. Sun Bing was sickened and felt like throwing up. The urge to vomit was stronger even than the desire to help his wife up off the ground. She managed to get to her feet on her own. Her hair was a mass of tangles, her gaunt face disfigured with smears of mud, tears, and blood. She looked ugly and scary. With a burst of sobs, she threw herself into his arms. And all he wanted to do was vomit. He was too weak to even hold her. Abruptly, she broke free and rushed to her children, who were still on the ground, still bawling. He stood there staring down at the German engineer, whose body was still wracked by spasms.

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5

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Faced with the German’s corpse, which lay coiled like a dead snake, Sun Bing vaguely sensed that something terrible lay in his immediate future. And yet a voice inside rose to his defense, presenting him with the rationale for his action: Those men were molesting my wife, this one with his hands inside her pants. And look what they did to my children. I hit him; what else was I to do? Would you stand by and watch while somebody did that to your wife? And I never meant to kill him. Who knew he’d have such a soft skull? Imbued with a sense of righteous behavior, he claimed a just and reasonable defense. My fellow villagers saw it all; they are my witnesses. So are the railroad workers. You can even ask the other German engineer, who will back me up if he has a conscience. It was their fault for molesting my wife and abusing my children. I reacted instinctively with understandable anger. I wouldn’t have hit him otherwise. And yet Sun Bing’s sense of reason and justice did nothing to make his legs less rubbery or his mouth less dry or foul tasting. Foreboding filled his mind and would not go away, no matter how hard he tried; it incapacitated his ability to entertain complex thoughts. Large numbers of the spectators were slipping quietly away; roadside peddlers scampered to pack up and leave: the risks of hanging around even a minute longer were too great. Shops on both sides of the broad avenue shut their doors—for inventory, the signs said—in the middle of the day. The gray avenue was suddenly broader and emptier than it had been, clearing the way for a strong wind to send dead leaves and scraps of paper tumbling and swirling in from the north. A small pack of dirty mutts that had taken refuge in one of the lanes set up a chorus of barks.

A blurry image of his family performing a drama at center stage in front of a large audience took shape in his head. Probing rays beheld them from cracks in shop doors, from neighborhood windows, and from many dark, gloomy places. His wife stood there shivering in the cold wind, holding both children in her arms and looking pitifully up at her husband, silently pleading for his forgiveness and understanding. Both children buried their faces in the folds of her jacket, like terror-stricken fledglings so worried about their heads that they left their backsides exposed. He felt as if his heart had been gouged out of his body. His suffering was immeasurable. His eyes burned, his nose ached, and a sense of impending tragedy was born. He kicked the twitching German’s foot. “You can goddamn stop playing dead!” he cursed and then looked up at the converging gazes and said loudly, “You all saw what happened here today. If the authorities come to investigate, please, whoever you are, tell them what you saw; do that for me, please.” With his hands clasped in front, he made a turn around the square. “I am the one who killed him,” he said. “I will take full responsibility and not implicate any of you, I promise you that!”

As he swept his children up in his arms, he told his wife to hold on to his jacket for the slow walk home. A blast of cold air sent chills up his spine; his sweat-soaked shirt scraped against his skin like armor.

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6

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Bright and early the next morning, he opened the shop and began the day as always by wiping down the tables and chairs. His helper, Stone, was out back pumping the bellows with all his might to keep the water boiling. Four brass teapots steam-whistled on the stove. But even after the sun came up over the eastern horizon, not a single customer had stepped inside. The street in front was cold, cheerless, and deserted. Gusts of chilled wind blew leaves past his door. His wife held tight to the twins’ hands and stuck to him wherever he went, flashes of sheer terror emanating from her eyes. He patted each of the children on the head and said with a light-hearted laugh:

“Go back inside, there’s nothing to be afraid of. It was all their doing, taking advantage of a good and decent woman. They’re the ones who deserve to lose their heads.”

He knew he was saying that to calm himself as well, since the hand holding the cleaning rag was shaking. Eventually, he managed to get his wife to go out back, so he could sit alone in the shop, tap a beat on a table, and sing a Maoqiang aria:

She is home and far away, who will watch over her, I cannot say. What will happen to me, good or ill, and will she survive to live another day? Ha! Fear squeezes sweat from my feverish body, let this all end well, I pray . . .

The song ended, the dam burst, and a lifetime of opera tunes poured out of him. The more he sang, the sadder he became, and the more despondent. Two lines of tears snaked down his cheeks and onto his naked chin.

The residents of Masang Township all quietly listened to Sun Bing’s songs that day.

And so he sang, all that day, till sunset, when the blood-red rays of a dying sun shone down on the willow trees lining the river, where flocks of sparrows perched in the airy canopy of the highest tree to announce the day’s end, as if sending him a sign. He closed up the shop and sat at the window, club in hand, after ripping off the paper covering so he could see everything that was happening outside. Stone brought him a bowl of cooked dry millet. The first bite stuck in his throat, and he erupted in a series of hacking coughs that sent kernels of millet shooting out of his nose like buckshot.

“Youngster,” he said to Stone, “I am in big trouble. Sooner or later the Germans will be here to exact revenge, so get out of here while you can.”

“I’m not going anywhere, Shifu,” Stone said as he brought a slingshot out from under his shirt. “I won’t let you fight them alone. I’m a crack shot with one of these.”

He let the boy have his way, in part because he was so hoarse he could barely talk. The pain in his chest was nearly unbearable, the same sensation he experienced when his voice cracked as he was training to sing opera. And still, though his hands trembled, now joined by his feet, he hummed arias to himself.

The clack of hooves on the cobblestone street sounded to the west soon after a crescent moon had ascended into the sky. He jumped to his feet, gripped the club tightly in his feverish hand, and readied himself for a fight. In the weak starlight, he saw the outline of a big, black mule running his way with an awkward gait. The rider, all in black, wore a mask.