Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused – Fiction From Today (14 page)

My tooth has not been pulled out yet, but it has acquired more profundity than if it had been.

Translated By Zhu Hong

He thought it felt like a sham right from the start. When the production-team leader, who was standing as guarantor, grinned and led the woman and a three- or four-year-old girl into the courtyard, he was pretty sure the one thing guaranteed was that the team leader had already boiled her noodles. But he steeled his heart and took in the woman and child anyway. His wife had been dead for twenty years, his two daughters married off, and after enduring a bachelor's life for twenty years, his lonely rod was all dried out with thirst. While the man and woman pressed their fingerprints onto the guarantee, the team leader broke off a straw from the kang mat, picked bits of green onion and egg out from between his teeth, and stuffed them back into his mouth, which reeked of alcohol.

"Good, yet another made-to-order family! A lonely rod like you, so poor you can't even marry. And you, with your man dead, you come begging at harvesttime, and as soon as you open your mouth, the food is there. One poor devil bumps into another: a perfect match. Everywhere you go in this world, it's the same: men sleeping with women, women having kids, and all of them sticking it out together. And don't you worry about that official commune wedding certificate yet. When you're all settled down, you just ask somebody to write home for a letter of proof to make up for it."

As they were walking out the gate, the leader pressed up against his ear and added, "You can't go wrong. She's from Hejialiang, Yulin County, Shaanxi. I got Liu the schoolteacher to check the map, and it's right where you'd expect it to be. She's not going to go running off the map. So tonight you just have yourself a good time taking care of that thirst of yours, but don't get too rough or anything. There'll be plenty more nights from now on. Heh heh, some goods she's got, nice and plump; I guarantee you, you can't go wrong…"

Suddenly, a flame rose up inside him. "You fucker, what's guaranteed is that you boiled her noodles!" But even as this rage flared up, it had already passed. Say what you will, he brought you a wife you didn't have to pay a thing for. And besides, even if it wasn't the team leader who boiled them this time, you sure won't be the first-or were you still dreaming about marrying some un-plucked lily? At this point in his thoughts, he had to laugh at that indescribable flame of rage: he was just like the old toad that lusts after a swan's flesh.

As soon as he had returned to his room, he pointed out the rice, flour, oil, and salt to the woman. He showed her how to get a fire going. He shouldered a couple of pails and filled up the cistern. Then, putting down the shoulder pole, he took up his ax and headed for the woodpile. For twenty years, he had put up with fetching enough water and cutting sufficient firewood just to make do, and after marrying off his daughters, he had lost interest in the flavor of even oil and salt. But today was different: his body was suddenly flooded with a rush of energy. He had really guzzled it down with the team leader, and now as the liquor burned fiercely in his chest, he felt slightly tipsy. The ax he wielded in the yard nearly rocked the mountains and shook the earth; with each thud, pure-white wood chips burst from beneath the razor-sharp blade. The ground around him was blotted with flowery white patches, like falling snow. As he was chopping, the woman came out to collect the firewood, and when she bent over beside him, he suddenly caught a glimpse of heavy swelling breasts jiggling provocatively. It was as if she had hidden a plump goose under her dingy clothes. He clamped his lips together and laughed inwardly: Nice fat tits like those-I'll bet you could balance a couple of temple guardians on top of them!

Actually, he had seen the woman the day before, after hearing that someone had come to the village begging for food and that she was staying overnight at the team leader's house. When he went over to take a look, he was unaware that she was looking for a husband. But seeing her now was a lot different from looking at her then. Yesterday it was a matter of looking at somebody else's woman; today he was seeing his own. With these thoughts in mind, his eyes locked onto her, betraying a possessive, wanton gleam: he eyed her up and down, from in front and from behind, her head, her legs… The woman clearly felt the scorch of his gaze. Enduring it in silence, she kept at the work in her hands without pause. Now and again she raised her eyes slightly to meet his but quickly let her eyelids drop in submission. His male intuition could sense the composure of her silent yielding, her calm of having bowed to fate. And yet he felt she shouldn't be so calm. The force of this calm collided with the surging heat in his chest: this coolness of hers was too unfeminine. Still, he couldn't imagine what kind of woman she would have to be to fulfill his masculine desires. Three people who had never laid eyes on one another in their lives had abruptly been made up into a family-even an opera has to have a prelude. But this was no opera. This woman before him had long since found out what goes on between men and women, and not just eight or ten times, either-she even had a child of three or four. A penniless, lonely old rod like you, what were you thinking, anyway? The liquor was still burning in his chest, and now yet another force was churning with it. He grasped the ax firmly in his hands, relying on his masculine strength to hold down that force stirring inside him. He couldn't let the struts supporting him collapse, and he certainly couldn't lose his male strut in front of this beggar woman. As he watched the woman's outline disappear behind the door, those full breasts appeared again before his eyes; that strange thought of his, that they could balance a couple of temple guardians on top, made him laugh. You dumb fuck, so you're still picky about whether you get a fat one or a lean one. Anything that satisfies hunger is a good meal!

After the midday meal, the lamp was lit; three strange shadows swayed up and down upon the kang mat and against the wall. Before the afternoon was half over, the woman had already wiped the room sparkling clean. A few embers still burned in the stove, where the woman stood leaning against the wall; set against the dusky lamplight, her face flickered in the glow. Steeped in a warmth and tenderness that seemed a little strange to a body and heart that the years had ground down coarse and crude, he was inexpressibly moved in the dusky lamp shadows and flickering glow of the fire. Yet even this emotion felt strange.

Everything he should ask and everything he should say he had already asked and said. Even the few words he had managed after searching and scraping the bottom of his belly had been said, too. About all that was left had to do with, well, with that coming moment, with
that
. All those struts he'd brought out, knowingly or not, to prop himself up had lightly and easily drifted away, like late-autumn leaves, leaving the tree standing naked.

The woman was waiting. Her face, flickering in the firelight, maintained its look of calmly bowing to fate.

The child was oblivious to what was going on between the man and the woman. She was fiddling with his deer-hoof pipe, turning it over and over in her hands while now and then a childish sentence or two of some local dialect slipped out between her lips.

A surge of impatience and resentment rose in his heart. The look of calm on the woman's face made him uneasy, and with a sweep of his hand he snatched the grimy bandanna off of his head and ordered her: "Here, wash this!"

The woman came over with a smile and reached out for it; he clutched her shoulder and with one yank twisted her toward him.

"Mama, a gun!" the girl shouted in her broad accent, pointing to a long rifle propped against the wall.

The woman didn't struggle; she simply lowered her eyes. "Let's wait till she's asleep."

"No. The side room's empty." He flared up and, without knowing why, thought back to how the team leader had boiled her noodles the night before. I have to eat his leftover noodles, and she tells me to wait?

The woman didn't utter another word; silently, she pulled over a pillow for the child, took her into her arms, and laid her down, then pulled out a gummy piece of candy that had been stuck in her pocket for who knows how long and pushed it into the child's mouth.

Without lighting a lamp, he dragged the woman onto the kang as if she were his prey. And there, in that lacquer-black darkness, the flood waters that had been choked off and swelling his chest for twenty years came gushing out in a savage frenzy. Two lives were fused into one body in that primal darkness, where it was impossible to distinguish between you and me, between man and woman, between what was somebody else's and what was your own.

A rat scrounging for food lost its footing, slipped through the roof, and dropped down, screeching shrilly; in its frantic flight, it bumped into a scalding yet supple mound of flesh; it couldn't make out what this thing could be, and the scrabbling of its tiny, piercing claws on the kang mat left behind only its frightened, scattered soul.

On the first day, that is how it went.

On the second day, that is how it went.

On the third day, that is still how it went.

He could tell he was in the grip of madness, but he didn't have the strength to stop this gush of insanity surging from the very core of his body. And he had only to think of that night before the woman belonged to him, how another man had already boiled her noodles, for that gush of madness to swell ten times over until it was many times larger than his own flesh-and-blood body, as if a hairy monster, panting heavily, stood there confronting him.

But over time, this gush of madness spent itself, drop by drop, on the woman's warm and soft, broad and giving bosom. Once that rabid nature had calmed down, his masculine self-respect and confidence were reborn in his body. One day after he had finished breakfast, he waited until the woman had cleaned and tidied everything up and then pulled out ten yuan from his chest pocket.

"Here."

The woman stared blankly without taking it.

"Too little? Here's ten more."

The woman still stared blankly.

"Don't try to fool me. You've already got a home, you've got a man, he's not dead, you've got other kids, they're all back home waiting for you."

"No, no…" The woman shook her head, alarmed.

"Go fool your own devil!" His anger was rising. "You'll live here for three months, five months, maybe a year or more, but when you see your chance, you'll be gone, and here I'll be, all alone again. Right? What do you think I'm after? Feeding you two all for nothing? So go! Go, if that's what you want. I am a man, you hear, and no one's going to make a monkey out of me!"

Tears trickled from the woman's eyes.

For some reason, he actually got some satisfaction out of those tears. He'd been feeling like a fool for days, knowing he hadn't broken this calm woman. As for himself, he'd kept getting flustered, waiting for nightfall, and as soon as it got dark, he'd get skittish about doing it. But now everything was all right. He'd poked through the blank-paper window that seemed to veil her, and she was clearly under his control.

The woman sobbed and cried, "Elder Brother-"

"Oh, so now you call me Elder Brother." Deep down he laughed grimly. So you can't keep it up after all, can you? If you've got what it takes to pull off something like this, then you've got to have what it takes to keep it up right to the end. But he didn't say these words aloud; he just squatted on the kang and smirked, feeling that everything was firmly in his grasp.

"Elder Brother, we've had a terrible harvest at home this year. We had no choice. I know I haven't done right by you. If you don't want to let us stay here, then we'll go. And your quilt, I pulled out the padding and washed it yesterday, but I haven't had time to sew it back up yet. After I finish that, I'll go."

Suddenly, a gush of tears stung his eyes, and he fought mightily to keep it back. His quilt hadn't been washed since that day three years ago, on the eve of his second daughter's wedding. For the past few days, this woman had been working in and around the house as if there were no tomorrow; in town, everybody said he'd stumbled upon a god of wealth right in the middle of the road. To tell the truth, he'd also tossed around the idea of keeping the woman and her child tied down here. He'd even thought about going back with her to Hejialiang to get that letter of proof. She was a good woman, but then a sham was still a sham. What angered him was that she had faked it so realistically that she had stirred his heart.

Yet in the end, her eyes, puffy and soft with tears, softened his masculine heart.

"If you want to stay, stay. If you want to go, go. I can't tell you what to do."

The woman fell to her knees in front of him. "Elder Brother, the girl's father and I will never forget you."

His temper flared up again; he was in a rage. "You go back, and tell your man that maybe my bullets can't reach him, but if they could, the first person I'd shoot would be him. The bastard!"

"Elder Brother, he's just a poor wretch, too. I'll do up the quilt for you. We'll leave tomorrow."

The little girl didn't understand what was going on between the adults; all she cared about was holding her mama tight, crying and yowling.

He had thought that they might make a scene, but now that it was actually happening, he felt totally at a loss-what kind of show did he think he was putting on anyway? But as he recalled the two fingerprints stamped on the guarantee and thought of how this woman who should have been his wife had really been somebody else's wife all along, surge after surge of the wildfire in his heart rose to his head. Husband and wife-the whole show had ended as quickly as it had begun.

That night after dinner, it was time once again to light the lamp, but the two of them stiffly and wordlessly held their ground. The child had already flopped over to a corner of the kang to sleep.