The Four Books (37 page)

The wind was strong enough to uproot entire trees, but there were no trees left. It was strong enough to blow away the grass, though all of the grass within an extended radius of the district had already been eaten by famished criminals. Therefore, all the wind could do was blow the sand and dust into vast clouds, like an enormous pile of bedding in the sky. The sun and the moon disappeared from view, and everyone’s mouths were filled with sand to the point that they had to rinse them out with water.

Everyone moved back and forth, and since they would have to sleep in pairs, hugging each other’s feet and legs, everyone started hanging out with whomever they got along the best. Accordingly, the Scholar, the Theologian, a legal scholar, and I began sleeping in the same room. We brought over the bedding of those people who had already passed away and used it for our own beds. We then brought over those extra bunks and took them apart, broke up the base of the bed, and at night would burn that wood in the middle of the floor, allowing it to burn all night. The Jurist donated a pair of leather shoes and the Scholar took off the leather belt he had been wearing, and they proceeded to cut them into thin strips, which they then boiled in water. Whenever someone became so hungry that they couldn’t stand it anymore, they would pull out a strip and chew it, even attempting to swallow it. Having temporarily suppressed their hunger, they would then lie motionless under their covers, trying to conserve energy and preserve their body heat. In this way, everyone endured the sandstorms and bitter cold. One night, the fire burned out in the middle of the night, but no one wanted to go break apart another cot. They were afraid that this would leave them so tired that they might simply collapse and not be able to get back up again. So instead, they pulled their covers tightly over their heads and listened as the wind howled outside, blowing sand against the windows and the door. Unable to sleep, I listened as the Theologian tossed and turned in the bed across from me. He called out to us, asking,

“Hey, are you asleep?”

The Scholar replied, “No, we aren’t.”

“I feel God wants to claim someone,” the Theologian said. “This is just like the flood shortly after people appeared on earth.” It seemed as though he wanted to add something else, to support his contention that God wanted to claim someone, but the Scholar coughed and the Theologian fell silent. The room became quiet, except for the sound of the wind. I knew that the Scholar’s cough was referring to me, and indicated his distrust of me. I therefore let go of his legs, depriving him of the benefit of the warmth from my chest. I turned over and pretended I had already fallen asleep. But I had forgotten that the Scholar was also hugging my own legs, allowing the warmth from his chest to circulate to my own body. I couldn’t very well turn back around and grasp his legs again, because that would reveal that I had been merely pretending to be asleep. A burst of frigid air entered the bed and chilled my legs, and just as I was considering whether to pull the sheets back down, the Scholar suddenly turned toward me and in the process pulled down the sheet, such that he was once again hugging my legs and feet tightly to his chest.

A surge of warmth radiated over to my feet. In that moment of stillness, I opened my eyes and saw the moonlight flowing in through the window like muddy water. After waiting for the light to fade, I crawled over to where the Scholar was lying and whispered, “I have something to tell you.” It was only then that I noticed that the Scholar, who had once been tall and strong, had wasted away to the point that he was now little more than skin and bones. Separated from him only by the sweater and long underwear he was using as pajamas, I felt his bones poking into my body, like a pile of firewood. “Do you know why the Musician’s face still has color? It is because she has a man, who gives her grain to eat.”

The Scholar abruptly sat up in bed, and asked,

“Have you seen this yourself?”

“I followed her several times. They always meet in the second iron furnace of the ninety-eighth, and each time the man always gives her grain and a breadroll.”

The Scholar gazed silently out the window.

“That man was in the military, and is one of the higher-ups from the ninety-eighth.”

The Scholar remained as silent as a piece of black cloth.

“Whenever the Musician hid some food under your covers for you, I would always steal it and eat it.”

The Scholar turned to look at me, and I saw that in the darkness the Scholar’s face looked like a board hanging in midair.

“I can make it up to you.” I too sat up and said confidently, “For each half bun of yours that I ate, I could give you either a full bun or half a
jin
of fried soybeans—I have a way of getting some grain from that higher-up from the ninety-eighth.”

“No need.” The Scholar slowly lay down, and added in a soft voice, “These days, as long as someone manages to avoid starving to death, it doesn’t really matter what else they do.” As he said this, he tugged on my pajamas, which I hadn’t changed or washed in more than two months, and gestured for me to lie down as well, saying, “Let’s sleep together. If we sleep together, we definitely won’t freeze to death.”

Therefore I lay back down again, and the two of us hugged tightly. I was a year and a half older than he, but embraced him the way I would my own child. He was a head taller than I, but hugged me the way he would his own younger brother. Our stick-thin bodies embraced under the covers, as warmth flowed from one to the other. Because the Theologian and the Jurist in the bed across the way were both cold, they buried their heads under the covers, such that their breath mixed together. After they fell asleep, the sound of their breathing also lulled me and the Scholar to sleep.

The next morning we didn’t wake up until long after the sun had begun to shine in through the window. We were finally roused by the Jurist, who announced,

“While you were sleeping, the Theologian died.”

After a moment of shock, I put on my clothes and shoes and went over to the bed across from mine to try to shake the Theologian awake, but it felt as though I were shaking a stone column. When the Scholar put his finger under the Theologian’s nose, the Jurist said impatiently, “I’ve already tried that. He doesn’t have the faintest trace of breath. He died before dawn. At sunrise I kicked off my sheets, and it was only then that I noticed he had knocked off his covers, at which point he either froze or starved to death.”

The Scholar and I stood in front of the Theologian’s bed. The Theologian’s face had turned an icy shade of green, like a layer of ice over a deep pond. The Scholar turned to me and asked, “What should we do?” I looked at the Theologian and replied, “We should take the body to the morgue room.” I proceeded to wrap the Theologian’s body in a sheet and began carrying it to the morgue. Because the westernmost room in each row of buildings was shielded from sun and exposed to the cold northwestern wind, they were designated as morgue rooms. The Scholar and I were surprised to discover that the Theologian—who was of average height, though he had wasted away to the point that he resembled a pile of sticks—had somehow become as heavy as a stone stele after death. I carried his legs and the Scholar his shoulders, but we had only managed twenty steps before we were so exhausted that we had to stop to rest.

When we reached the morgue, a bitterly cold wind blew right at us, as though we had just stepped into an icebox. Inside, we placed the Theologian’s body on a cot next to the window, beside the seven other corpses. The Scholar counted the corpses on each of the cots, and when he reached thirteen he looked at me. “That’s not too bad,” he said. “It’s not as many as I had expected.” The Jurist brought the Theologian’s teeth-brushing cup, toothbrush, and a couple of pairs of old shoes, together with a little red volume by that highest of higher-ups. He placed all of these items inside the Theologian’s sheet, then came up to us and smiled. He extended his hand, and revealed more than twenty red blossoms. “There are twenty-seven blossoms in total; we can divide them equally among us.”

The Jurist looked at me.

“You can have them all,” I said magnanimously. “I don’t think I’ll be able to survive this famine.”

The Jurist smiled as he placed the small blossoms into his pocket. When he removed his hand, he was holding a sheet of paper folded into an envelope. “I found this under the Theologian’s bed.” As he said this, he opened the envelope, and inside there was a color portrait of Mother Mary. By this point the portrait’s colors had already begun to fade, though the page itself remained intact. Her eyes, though, had been gouged out, leaving her sockets looking like bottomless pits. On the portrait, the Theologian had written, “I hate you! . . . It is you who made me a criminal!” The Jurist held the portrait and asked, “Do we want to leave this by the Theologian’s side?” The Scholar considered for a moment, then took the portrait and ripped it up, leaving the scraps on either side of the Theologian’s head. He removed the book with the red cover and pried open the Theologian’s rigid fingers, inserting the volume into his grasp.

When I emerged from the morgue room, I heard the Physician screaming from behind the wall in back of the last row of the building. Using all of her energy but without seeming to open her mouth, she shouted, “Hey, can any of you men come help us lift this corpse? For the life of us, we simply can’t budge it!”

The Scholar and I looked at each other, then walked in the direction of the sound, pulled forward as though we were a kite on a string.

5.
Old Course
, pp. 464–75.

All told, that bitter cold lasted seven days, after which the sun suddenly reappeared in the sky, like an indistinct glow from a fire shining through a layer of ice. The warm weather returned, and people’s footsteps could once again be heard in the courtyard. It was only then that I finally emerged from my room. The leather shoes and belts that had been boiled in the pot had already been consumed, and the Scholar, the Jurist, and I had even drunk most of the black water in which they had been boiled. Fortunately, the sun returned, and everyone could come of out their buildings and resume their search for wild grass. It was early morning, and the sun was only halfway to the top of the sky. I took two more gulps of boiled leather water, then followed the sound of footsteps wafting in.

As soon as I stepped outside, I noticed that there was a half-foot-thick layer of dust on the ground, which felt like stepping on a cotton comforter. While I was standing in the doorway, a bright dot suddenly flew in front of me. I rubbed my eyes, then used my hands to shield them from the light. I saw that the first person to head toward the district gates of the ninety-ninth was the Musician. She was wearing her pink jacket, and when she reached the main entranceway she looked around and saw that there was a bamboo pole as thick as a finger and half as tall as a person impaled in the ground right outside the gate. When the Musician saw the pole she paused and looked around again, then quickly walked over to it. She examined it, tossed it aside, and headed toward her old rendezvous site in the ninety-eighth.

What ensued was like something out of an opera. The surrounding wasteland was completely silent, and after several days of strong winds there wasn’t even a bird left in the sky. The fields and roads were covered in a thick layer of dust. The road leading to the ninety-eighth was flat and empty, but with a series of fresh two-inch-deep footprints. I suddenly felt revitalized. I knew that the bamboo pole in the entranceway had been left there by the higher-up from the ninety-eighth, and that it was his sign to the Musician that he wished to see her. I trailed the Musician at a safe distance, as though she were a fire in the middle of the wilderness. She didn’t seem to care whether she was being followed, and instead hurried forward without looking back. Even when she had to stop and rest, she still didn’t look back.

Everything unfolded more or less as I had expected. The Musician followed that dimly marked path, pausing three or four times to catch her breath. When she reached the ninety-eighth, she headed toward the spot where in the past she had stuck that bamboo pole. Unable to find the stick that she had used so many times before, she began searching around the sandy soil for a new one. In order to have the man from the ninety-eighth see her as soon as possible, she found three short sticks, then took a handkerchief out of her pocket, tore it into strips with her teeth, and tied the sticks together end-to-end and planted the now meter-high stick into the ground on the edge of the plot as though it were a flagpole. The Musician nudged the stick a few times to make sure it wouldn’t fall down, then headed off toward the furnace.

As the Musician walked away, she used her fingers to smooth her hair while straightening her clothes. On her way to the furnace this time, she proceeded slowly, and kept glancing back at the stick she had planted by the side of the road. She seemed worried that it might fall over, or that the man might not appear. However, it turned out that her concerns were unwarranted. Not long after she entered the furnace, the man approached, as though he had been hiding nearby just waiting for the stick to appear. I, meanwhile, was tucked in a nearby ravine, and I had to crawl over the sand and dirt. I saw that when the man approached from the ninety-eighth, he was still wearing the same military uniform as before and was carrying a bag. The smell of fried soybeans emanated from this bag, making my nostrils flare with anticipation. Each time the man took a step forward, the bag would rub against his leg. Even though the bag kept getting in his way, he still walked briskly, not at all like someone who was famished. When he reached the stick, he tossed it aside. When he turned and headed toward the furnace where the Musician was waiting, I immediately stood up in the ravine where I was hiding and quickly walked over, until I was standing right in front of him. My appearance seemed to make him extremely anxious. He stared for a moment with a look of astonishment. I was standing two steps from him, and saw that he was at least half a head taller and his shoulders were as wide as a door, but his ruddy face was marred by more than a dozen prominent pockmarks. Furthermore, he was missing several front teeth, and in their place he had gold crowns that sparkled in the sunlight. I had never expected he would be so ugly, and upon seeing him I was suddenly filled with loathing for the Musician. The fact that she was willing to have sex with someone so repulsive made me feel as though my chest were full of filthy flies. I stared at that gold-toothed, uniform-wearing man, and saw that he had large patches on his jacket and his pants. I gazed at him disdainfully and said, “I’m already aware of your activities in the furnace. If you don’t want me to tell anyone, then you have to give me at least half of the soybeans you have in that bag.”