The Garlic Ballads (11 page)

The police frantically placed the horse-faced young man into a red-and-yellow police wagon. Gao Yang couldn’t see his face, but there was blood all over the white tunic wrapped around his head, and more of it dripping to the ground. The unlocked handcuffs dangling from his wrist dragged along the ground as he was lifted into the wagon. A young policeman jumped into the cab to take over for the driver, who stood by ashen-faced, neck scrunched down and arms hanging stiffly at his sides as he quaked in terror. After confiscating his driver’s license, the policemen kicked him repeatedly.

“Little Gao, hurry up and get the prisoners loaded,” old Zheng shouted. “We’ll come back to pick this one up later.”

One of the policemen unlocked Gao Yang’s handcuffs and ordered him to his feet. As he heard the command and then the click of the lock, his first instinct was to pull his arms forward from around the tree; but they wouldn’t answer his bidding, and he was horrified to realize that they might as well not have existed at all. The only sensation was of a heavy weight pressing down on his back. When the policeman moved the limp arms around front with his foot, Gao Yang was relieved to find that they were still attached to his shoulders.

Now that the horse-faced young man was in the police van, the policeman unceremoniously recuffed Gao Yang’s hands in front; then he and his partner lifted him to his feet and told him to walk to the van. At that moment he wanted nothing more than to comply with the comrade policemen’s request, since they had enough trouble on their hands already. Anything to make their job easier. Which was why the discovery that his legs were no more capable of moving than his arms so disturbed him. He blushed from a profound sense of embarrassment.

They had to drag him to the van. “Get in.” He looked up bashfully, trying to speak, but his lips seemed frozen. This time they appeared to appreciate his predicament, for instead of yelling, they lifted him up under his arms; he tried to help by making himself as light as possible when his curled legs left the ground, and the next thing he knew he was lying beside the bloodied young man across the bed of the vehicle.

Another curled-up object was flung into the van. It was Fourth Aunt Fang. He could tell by the way she was groaning that she had banged her hip badly when she landed.

The rear door was latched after two policemen climbed in and sat on side benches. Then the driver started the engine, and off they went. As they drove through the government compound, Gao Yang took a last look at the poplar tree where he had been shackled, and actually felt a tinge of nostalgia. Bathed in late-afternoon sunlight, the trunk had turned deep brown, and the once lush green leaves now looked like a cache of ancient bronze coins. Purplish blood belonging to the horse-faced young man had puddled at the base. The moving van was still parked there, its driver surrounded by a crowd of neatly dressed people who, to all appearances, were making life miserable for him.

Jinju, her belly jutting out in front, stood motionless, a sight that reminded Gao Yang of Fourth Aunt’s admonition to go find happiness with Gao Ma. He sighed, for at that moment Gao Ma, who had scaled the wall one step ahead of the police, was a fugitive with handcuffs dangling from one wrist.

As soon as the police wagon was out on the main road, it sped up, and the eerie howl of its siren sent chills up Gao Yang’s spine. But he quickly got used to it. Jinju now seemed to be chasing them, but so slowly she all but disappeared from view; and when they negotiated a curve, she and the government compound were gone.

Fourth Aunt was curled up in a corner. Her blurry eyes were open, but what she saw was anyone’s guess. Blood from the young man’s head dripped onto the floorboards—you could smell it. His body twitched, and his wrapped head lolled back and forth, emitting an occasional puffing noise.

Lying in the speeding police van, Gao Yang felt vaguely motion-sick. He saw swirling dust through cracks in the rear door; trees lining the road fell like dominoes, and fields on both sides spun in slow motion. Other vehicles pulled over when they heard the shriek of the siren, and Gao Yang watched a hounded tractor with an open-air cab crash into a scarred willow tree at the side of the road. Jittery cyclists were left in their dust, making Gao Yang’s chest swell with pride. Have you ever gone this fast before? he asked himself. No, never!

As they sped along, Gao Yang detected the scent of fresh raw garlic in the young man’s blood. Surprised, he breathed in deeply to make sure he wasn’t mistaken. No, it was garlic, all right—raw and clean, like bulbs fresh from the ground, a drop of nectar still clinging to the spot where the stalk has snapped.

Gao Yang touched the drop of nectar with his tongue, and his taste buds were treated to a cool, sweet taste that relaxed him. He surveyed his three acres of garlic field. It was a good crop, the white tips large and plump, some at a jaunty angle, others straight as a board. The garlic was moist and juicy, with downy sprouts beginning to appear. His pregnant wife was on her hands and knees beside him, yanking garlic out of the ground. Her face was darker than usual, and there were fine lines around her eyes, like veins of spreading rust on a sheet of iron. As she knelt, knees coated with mud, her childhood deformity—a stunted left arm that inconvenienced her in everything she did—made the job harder than it ought to have been. He watched her reach down and pinch the stalks with a pair of new bamboo chopsticks; the effort made her bite her lip each time, and he felt sorry for her. But he needed her help, for he’d heard that the co-op was setting up shop in the county town to buy the garlic crop at slighdy over fifty fen a pound, higher than last year’s peak price of forty-five. He knew the county had expanded the amount of acreage given over to garlic this year; and with a bumper crop, the earlier you harvested yours, the sooner you could sell it. That was why everyone in the village, women and children included, was out in the fields. But as he looked at his pitiable pregnant wife, he said, “Why not rest awhile?”

“What for?” She raised her sweaty face. “I’m not tired. I just worry the baby might come.”

“Already?” he asked anxiously.

“I figure some time in the next couple of days. I hope it waits till the harvest is in, at least.”

“Do they always come when they’re due?”

“Not always. Xinghua was ten days late.”

They turned to look behind them, where their daughter sat obediently at the edge of the field, her sightless eyes opened wide. She was holding a stalk of garlic in one hand and stroking it with the other.

“Careful with that garlic, Xinghua,” he said. “Each stalk is worth several fen.”

She laid it down and asked, “Are you finished, Daddy?”

“We’d be in trouble if we were,” he said with a chuckle. “We wouldn’t earn enough to get by.”

“We’ve barely started,” her mother answered tersely.

Xinghua reached down to run her hand over the pile of garlic beside her. “Yi!” she exclaimed. “The pile’s really getting big. We’ll make lots of money.”

“I figure we’ll bring in over three thousand pounds this year. At fifty fen a pound, that makes fifteen hundred yuan.”

“Don’t forget the tax,” his wife reminded him.

Oh, right, the tax,” Gao Yang muttered. “Not to mention extra-high expenses. Last year fertilizer cost twenty-one yuan a sack. This year it’s up to twenty-nine ninety-nine.”

“They think it sounds better than thirty,” she grumbled.

“The government always deals in odd numbers.”

“Money’s hardly worth the paper it’s printed on these days,” his wife complained. “At the beginning of the year you could buy a pound of pork for one-forty, now it’s up to one-eighty. Eggs went for one-sixty a handful, and they were big ones. Now it’s two yuan, and they’re no bigger than apricots.”

“Everyone’s getting rich. Old Su from the business institute just built a five-room house. I almost died when I heard it cost him fifty-six thousand.”

“That kind never has trouble getting money,” his wife said. “But people like us, who scratch a living out of the earth, will still be poor thousands of years from now.”

“Count your blessings,” Gao Yang said. “Think back a few years ago, when we didn’t even have enough to eat. The past couple of years we’ve had good bleached flour for every meal, and our elders never had it that good.”

“You come from a landlord family, and you can still say your elders never had it as good as us?” his wife mocked him.

“What good did being landlords do them? They were too stingy to eat and too cheap to shit. Every fen went into more land. My parents suffered their whole lives. Mother told me once that before Liberation in
‘49
, they would start each year with eight ounces of cooking oil, and have six left at the end of the year.”

“Sounds like some kind of magic to me.”

“Nope. She said that when they cooked a meal they’d wet a chop-stick in water before dipping it in the oil. Then for every drop of oil that stuck to the chopstick a drop of water remained in the bottle. That’s how you start out with eight ounces and end up with six.”

“People knew how to get by back then.”

“But their sons and daughters learned what suffering is all about,” Gao Yang said. “If not for Deng Xiaoping, the landlord label would have stuck to me.”

“Old Man Deng’s been in power for ten years now. I hope the gods let him live a few more.”

“Anyone that high-spirited is bound to live a long time.”

“What puzzles me is how senior officials can eat like kings, dress like princes, and have the medical care of the gods; then, when they reach their seventies or eighties and it’s time to die, off they go. But take a look at our old farmers. They work all their lives, raise a couple of worthless sons, never eat good food or wear decent clothes, and in their nineties they’re still out in the fields every day.”

“Our leaders have to deal with all lands of problems, while we con cera ourselves with working, eating, and sleeping, period. That’s why we live so long—we don’t wear our brains out”

“Then tell me why everyone wants to be an official and no one wants to be a peasant.”

“Being an official has its own dangers. One slip and you re worse off than any peasant could possibly imagine.”

A stalk of garlic snapped in two as she yanked it out of the ground. She whimpered.

“Be careful,” Gao Yang grumbled. “Each one’s worth several fen.”

“Why such a mean look?” His wife defended herself. “I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“I didn’t say you did.”

The police wagon passed through a red gateway and screeched to a halt, sending Gao Yang’s head sliding into the horse-faced young man. The scent of blood persisted, but the garlic smell was gone.

She drifted in and out of consciousness as she lay across Gao Ma’s back, her arms wrapped tightly around his powerful neck. When they crossed Following Stream, leaving one county and entering another, she had sensed that all ties between her and the past, between her and her home, between her and her kin—if they still counted as such—had been cut with one stroke. She could no longer hear the shouts of her father and brother, but felt them on her back. Tipped with golden barbs, they danced in the air before flying across the river and snagging on the tips of jute bushes. With her eyes closed she could concentrate on the sound of Gao Ma’s body crashing through the jute field, so densely packed it stopped even the wind, creating the gentle sound of ocean waves.