The Dragon's Village: An Autobiographical Novel of Revolutionary China (17 page)

I turned to Wang Sha and queried him silently with a gesture.

“You two go and visit Da Niang. After I finish up work here, I'll join you.” He thought for a moment and then added, “Or you join me here.”

As on a screen before my eyes I saw A-rong's comical
little face raised in song; then it was blotted out in blood. It was only at that moment that a full realization of what had happened came home to me.

Da Niang sat inside the door of her cottage—in the compound where I had spent my first night in the township—a distraught look on her face. As soon as she saw me, she threw up her arms and her cries rent the air:

“I may be poor, but I'm not crazy. I don't believe in getting anything without paying for it. I'm fifty years old now and going downhill, but I've managed to survive. Why should I worry now? But my son is dead!”

Strange disjointed cries. She burst into tears, beating her breast. She slapped her own face, punishing herself. I tried to comfort her, as did the other women gathered in the cottage. Then all of a sudden she stopped crying and became very quiet. She leaned forward, listening, straining her ears. To our surprise she darted out into the courtyard. She was no longer the mother distraught with sorrow.

“You son of a bitch, how dare you drink from my pail?” she yelped and let out a string of curses against a mongrel that had wandered into the yard. She returned carrying two pails of water. After she set them down, she angrily hit her elder son with the flat carrying pole. “You lazybones, why did you leave the pails outside? Oh, you'll be the ruin of me!”

She was so frail that the blow hardly jolted him as it glanced off his shoulder. He just looked up, staring at her from where he sat by the wall. Tu's wife gingerly took the pole from Da Niang's hand.

Da Niang resumed her seat with a thump. She settled her feet comfortably apart and immediately began wailing again about her misfortunes.

The child's body lay on the kang in the inner room. His face was blue and swollen. Vomited blood had congealed at the corner of his mouth. I had never seen death before and I trembled with fright, but under the gaze of so many pairs of curious eyes I was determined not to show my
fear. I bit my lip to prevent myself from crying out. I placed the white sheet I had brought with me in Da Niang's lap.

“Da Niang, let him take this with him.”

Da Niang wiped off her tears and narrowed her one good eye—the other was opaque and blind—to look at my gift. She felt the sheet lovingly and murmured, “What good cotton. Wrapped in this, he'll be luckier than his father. His father died in the depths of winter, but still he had nothing to wear but his summer clothes. I dream that he shivers with cold in the underworld.”

The women neighbors came over to feel these burial clothes, chattering all the while. They took my gift to the window and held it up to the light to scrutinize every seam. Though it was worn, it was fine, machine-stitched Swatow linen, from my aunt's linen closet. They had never seen anything like it.

Da Niang folded the sheet. Her elder son, who had not uttered a single word, now came up wanting to touch the sheet too. But I angrily pushed his hands away and said sharply, “It's none of your business.”

Da Niang shot a glance at him. He stepped back, perplexed, and stood still. His long, flat face was immobile, but his disproportionately long arms with their thick veins were twitching spasmodically at his sides. I knew the boy was not responsible for what he had done, but emotion got the better of me. Cheng, who had also come to offer condolences to Da Niang, succeeded in irritating me still further with his whispered admonishment, “Be considerate. He didn't know what he was doing.”

Instructed by an old and experienced neighbor, we began to prepare the little corpse for burial. First, we fetched water to wash the child's face and body, though Da Niang nagged us not to waste precious water. Then we clothed him neatly and placed the little body wrapped in the sheet on two boards set on trestles in the front room. While we hastened to complete these dismal rites, the idiot son sneaked away. The other women soon departed, leaving Cheng and me to keep Da Niang company.

She was tired. She had suffered a terrible loss. Who
would look after her now in her old age? Her cheeks, the skin stretched tight over her high cheekbones, shone red as if with fever. We insisted that she go into the inner room to rest on the kang while we kept vigil beside the corpse.

Night had fallen. Only the dim light of the oil lamp remained. I felt that the place was haunted by the wronged ghost of the boy. I shuddered at Da Niang's intermittent whimpering. My teeth chattered uncontrollably. Cheng was mumbling to himself while he paced the room.

A rat was gnawing at something in a corner. I've always particularly hated rats, with their nauseating smell. Oddly, now I felt friendly towards this one. At least its presence meant life, and it lessened my fear.

There was a knock on the door, and at my answer it opened softly. Xiu-ying stood in the stream of bright moonlight which flooded in.

“You can go home now, Elder Sister,” she said quietly. “I will keep Da Niang company.”

Returning to Wang Sha's room, Cheng and I found him seated before a pile of papers which he had been reading. He pushed them aside. “Do you know exactly how it happened?” he asked. “Is what we heard the full story?” He looked grave.

“I don't know,” Cheng replied. “It was no time to discuss the matter with Da Niang.”

I felt that I ought to tell them about that midnight meeting of Tu and the Broken Shoe, and I did. “It was Tu's wife who egged Da Niang on to punish the boy. Are all these things somehow connected? Perhaps Da Niang has been hoodwinked by them,” I suggested.

“How could Tu choose this moment to get mixed up with such a woman?” Cheng wondered. “It'll ruin his career.” He cautiously glanced around. “You can't make accusations like that in an offhand way. I'm sure more than a few solid family men around here have played around with the Broken Shoe. No one will take her word for it; you have to catch them in the act. And then—well, I've seen villagers tie two guilty parties together with ropes
and expose them publicly. It would be disastrous for all of us.”

“Cheng is right,” interjected Wang Sha, no doubt wishing to skim over the appalling picture Cheng had called up. “It's a touchy question and we mustn't act rashly. Tu is a peasant activist and one of the first in the village. If we wrongly accused him it would be a first-class scandal.”

Wang Sha paused to take a sip of water. He rested the bowl for a moment on his knee and then got up to place it on the low table by the wall. He stood there for a moment nervously shifting his feet. “Now, let's see what we can do about all this.” He talked not so much to us as to himself.

I wished that I could do something to help him, to lessen his worries. I had been considering one idea and now said, “I think I'll move back to stay with Da Niang. Maybe having a friend in the house will be of help. And if I can get her to talk about the past, it will influence every other woman in the township. Da Niang is one of the poorest of them all, the one who has suffered most from the landlords, yet she is the most stubborn in refusing to say a word against them or even come to our meetings.” Surely that offer would impress Wang Sha!

Wang Sha looked at me as if sizing me up. He frowned.

“If you move back there it could be dangerous,” he said. “Those landlords, well, there's no telling what a vengeful man will do.”

Malvolio Cheng furiously knocked the ashes out of his pipe by striking it on the leg of the narrow bench on which he sat.

The sharp noise jogged my conscience. Suddenly I realized what I was really thinking about. Da Niang had lost her son, that bright boy, and was being driven out of her mind by sorrow. And I was snatching this time to think of impressing Wang Sha. I was using her sorrow and bereavement to gain my own ends, and yet at the same time I knew I truly wanted to help her.

“We must find out what's at the bottom of this murder,” I cried. “Somehow I feel responsible for that poor boy's death.”

9
  

I moved back into Da Niang's ramshackle cottage, and this time, although she didn't give me a joyous welcome, she did at least come to the door to greet me, and eventually her good nature got the better of her. She helped me sweep and dust the neglected room next to hers and cover the kang with a mat woven of split millet stalks. We moved the rickety table nearer the paper-covered window, set up my wash basin on a stand of bricks, and placed my last piece of furniture, a small, square stool, in front of the table ready for work.

This time Da Niang and I began to spend time with each other. In the morning, before I went off to work, I helped her with the household chores, sweeping the yard and fetching water from a nearby well. In the evening after I came home she sewed beside the small oil light in her room and I read and wrote. She was an unpredictable companion. Sometimes she was silent and self-absorbed, at others irascible and sharp-tongued. If someone did her a mischief, either real or imagined, she could curse them for hours, muttering to herself or aloud to their faces equally without restraint.

We seemed to become quite friendly, but as soon as I tried to get her to talk about her past and the hurt she had suffered at the hands of the landlords she became tongue-tied. After exchanging a few evasive words on the subject,
she would turn about abruptly and go out into the yard to do her “chores.” What these were it was hard to say. She was too poor to own even a single sheep or pig. Her one chicken spent the whole day fruitlessly clucking and scratching in the empty yard. It was only too obvious that Da Niang was determined to evade my questions, and that made me more anxious than ever to get her story.

One day when she beat her usual retreat I followed her out. I looked around the courtyard and beyond the broken wall without seeing a sign of her. She had vanished.

“Da Niang,” I called.

Her wizened face popped out above the dried millet stalks piled on top of the chicken coop. She looked like a gnome. Her sunburnt, yellow skin was wrinkled like a dried orange. Deep brown blotches left by illness or malnutrition disfigured it. Her shifting, hooded eye showed her misgivings. “Now I have to get some water from the well,” she said, and went off with the buckets. I was knocking my head against a stone wall of evasiveness. I was sorry to pester her, but she held the key to her own liberation and I needed that key for her sake as well as my own.

That night I lay on the kang racking my brains for an answer to the riddle of Da Niang's silence. Certainly poverty, ignorance, and fear played a part, but the more I thought things over, the more perturbed I grew. If Da Niang weren't somehow linked to the silence and apathy that still shackled half the township, why did she keep such a distance between us in spite of our friendship? Was she deliberately playing a double game—in with the landlords as well as the work team? It was an open secret that her idiot son sometimes slyly visited landlords and drank with them. Who knew what dark impulse might sway his sick mind? The death of Da Niang's younger son looked like an accident, but it could have been planned as a lesson to anyone who shouted accusations against the landlords. Soon I began to wonder if by staying with Da Niang I had unwittingly played into the hands of our enemies.

The light of my oil lamp flickered. It was just a snippet of wick burning on the lip of a saucer. Peasants had used
lamps just like it in China's countryside for five thousand years. As it danced, it seemed more fragile than ever. Fantastic shadows moved across the wall. I had not slept soundly one single night since coming back to Da Niang's cottage. I was half-conscious and apprehensive all the time. I felt my body floating up and down endlessly. I never dared sleep and lose consciousness completely.

I was a stranger here and everyone seemed strange to me, at times even Xiu-ying. In a fit of despondency, I wished that I had never volunteered so rashly for this bleak Northwest. Everything here was so totally different, even down to the guttural sounds of the northern dialect. I would at least have felt more at ease speaking our Shanghai dialect closer to home. These thoughts made my brick kang seem all the harder and colder. I was also constantly afraid that one of the landlords' hangers-on would break into my room—to steal, to rape, to murder. No one expected all the landlords to take their losses quietly.

When I walked in the township now I would occasionally pass men dressed in sober black jacket and trousers. They would go by silently, eyes to the ground to avoid being snubbed. They were either landlords or their agents. The peasants turned their eyes away from them, now condemned to live in limbo. Particularly in front of a land reform team worker, greeting the wrong person in public, no matter how long they had known him, meant taking the wrong side. The township was dividing into hostile camps.