The Dragon's Village: An Autobiographical Novel of Revolutionary China (39 page)

When she came to, it was still dark. She was covered with a torn cotton jacket and a woman sat beside her holding her child. The woman told her that she had been driven from her home by marauding soldiers. The best thing they could do was to get as far away from there as possible. Afraid to take the road, they made off over the open countryside. The undergrowth, sighing in the wind, could hide them.

Then suddenly the rain that the peasants had wanted so desperately began to fall. The whole earth turned to mud. A brutal wind flung the rain, in sheets, against her face. The mud held on to her feet—each step was an effort. She had lost all her companions. Through the wet darkness she thought she saw a dim light. Perhaps it was a station? She didn't know it but she had long ago left the railway far behind her. It was an encampment of a mule team caravan going northwest. Taking pity on her and her starving baby, they took her along with them, crossing the famine area as fast as possible and dropping her off in Longxiang.

At the end of her story, Da Niang added: “You know the rest.”

Matter-of-factly she uncovered an earthenware pot and took out a piece of baked corn pancake. She fetched the small bottle of wild pickles and offered the pancake and pickles to me. “You're hungry,” she said, “take them.”

“No. I can't. You need them more. I am younger and stronger than you and I still have a bit of pancake left at home.”

“You are younger and that means you need more food. This is your first famine. You aren't used to this kind of life. I just hope it won't be as bad as the last one. And I have some good news to tell you that I just heard. While you were all away in the fields a message was brought to Shen. It said that since the peasants were suffering in the spring hunger, some of the grain taken from the landlords should be distributed right away to those who needed it most. Shen told us we should thank Chairman Mao for that.”

She looked contemplatively at a picture pasted on the wall beside the stove.

“But what have you done with the picture of the Kitchen God that was there?”

Noticing the surprise in my voice, she said, “I took it down and put up that picture of Chairman Mao. I thought you people had given Shen that idea.”

“No. He must have gotten the message and the picture directly from the Party committee in the county town. But it's some politicians in Peking who came up with such an idea. They're much more important than any of us.”

“You sound as if you don't like this.”

“No. I don't like any superstitions, old or new. I think Chairman Mao owes thanks to you people for giving him a chance to see if he can do better than the old governments.”

Da Niang looked at me with the amazement she usually reserved for what she considered our “strange remarks.” Dismissing the matter of the Kitchen God, she came back to more practical affairs.

“I'll have some fresh grain soon, so you take this pancake now or I'll have to bring it to you this evening after you've finished your work.”

I compromised by taking a piece of the pancake with some pickles wrapped in it and folding Da Niang's present into my handkerchief.

“Put it away carefully now. Hungry people know no shame,” she said.

24
  

My neck was stiff and aching. I lifted my right hand to rearrange the pillow, but my hand felt numb. I licked it, but there was no feeling in it. Startled, I half opened my eyes, not knowing for sure whether I was awake or dreaming. Instinctively I looked for the door and the window. But no door faced me, nor was the small window there to my right. This wasn't my room. I struggled to raise myself, but my arm lying beneath my body had gone completely numb. I rubbed my hands together and massaged my arm to restore the circulation. I settled myself more comfortably and looked around in the morning twilight. Now I saw both the door and the window but they were on the side, behind my head. Then I remembered that this was my new room. I was no longer staying with either Da Niang or Xiu-ying. The hectic days of our land reform work were over.

Ma Li lay beside me and murmured something in her sleep. There was a slight frown on her forehead and the right corner of her mouth was pulled down in a wry grimace. She had arrived the previous evening to help us celebrate the climax of our work. This was the day when the actual distribution of land would take place and the new owners would receive title to their land. I had looked forward to this day with a sense of fulfillment. But an unalloyed sense of achievement would not be mine. I was
already being nagged by the feeling that something more remained to be done. It was Ma Li with her bold ideas who once again confronted me with a new dilemma.

I was already in bed when she arrived. She pushed the door open with her back burdened with her bedding roll and for a moment I was nonplussed to see this strange, ungainly thing entering my room. Then she turned to face me cheerily. The tip of her nose and her cheeks were red with cold. She was in an exuberant mood and so eager to share her news with me that she sat down at the edge of the kang with the bedding roll still on her back.

“Let me help you unpack.”

“Don't bother. Let me catch my breath first and then I'll take my time making myself comfortable.”

As she undid the straps of her backpack she blurted out, “Have you heard that some of us may go to Qinghai?”

“Qinghai Province?” I cried, staring openmouthed. If Gansu was “beyond the Great Wall,” then Qinghai was at the back of beyond.

“So you haven't heard? Well, it seems that, this autumn, land reform will be carried out in Qinghai. Some places there are much worse off than here. Mountain villages are snowed in for nearly half the year and I've heard that there are Tibetan villages where women slaves are still giving birth to babies to increase their masters' wealth. Since the situation there is so complicated, they want only volunteers who have already had some experience in land reform work. So I've volunteered to go. How about that?”

I didn't answer her immediately but crawled back into my warm quilt.

“Not many cadres are needed there. Early applications will be considered first.” She paused. “This is a moment in history that will never be repeated. I don't want to miss any of it.”

Later, as I looked down at her asleep beside me, I wondered if she were dreaming of Qinghai's snow-blocked valleys.

I crawled around her and off the kang. In the stillness of the early morning, every movement seemed to make a clatter. I did my best not to wake her up because I wanted
to walk around the village and be alone with it to say good-bye.

I could not love it. Its bleakness and violence horrified me. Then I reminded myself that I had seen it only in the beginning and end of winter, neither in its autumn nor its real spring when green would cover the plain, the willows would shimmer with bronze and yellow-green buds, and the dark green of the firs and pines on Green Dragon Mountain would be shot with emerald. Would I love it any better then? But love it or not, I knew I would never forget it.

Three sides of the village were still surrounded by the eroded and broken earthen wall which had once surrounded it completely. I walked slowly from end to end along its narrow top where no one would cross my path. This suited my mood perfectly. When I reached the end of the wall on the opposite side I felt I had said good-bye. On this fourth side there was no trace of a wall or anything like a border line. They had hacked down the rampart to fill in the moat beyond it, and now the village was open on this side to the brown, flat immensity of a plain that stretched as far as one could see—without houses, trees, or even the grave mounds which usually dotted such a wasteland. Off towards the right in this direction we had gone to search Landlord Chi's house. Towards the left, the barrenness and monotony were broken by a stranded cloud, whiter than the sky, shimmering, rolling slowly in amorphous shapes like a writhing dragon escaping to the invisible horizon. Here it fused with the mist, which, like that in a classical painting by Mi Fei, did not stop at the horizon but floated far beyond it, too far for my imagination to follow.

I thought of Wang Sha. But I thought of him now with a strange detachment. During the months I had spent in Longxiang, and even before, my feeling for him had hardly for a single day at a time been one consistent sentiment. It had been like a melody played on a many-stringed instrument. First one string and then another had been plucked; then came cadences, delicious trills, sometimes subdued, sometimes tumultuous; and then resounding chords, unbearably
exciting. But then the music had settled into a quiet measure that was already almost a memory. A theme and variations had been improvised by a mysterious hand. But the music had died away, unfinished, and now I knew that it would remain unfinished.

The barely rising sun suffused the eastern sky with a brighter light. The west, by contrast, seemed to dim until the tip of a cloud or mist caught a glow of rosy light that seemed to be focused on it exclusively. A mirage? Beyond it I could see the Kunlun Mountains four hundred miles away, the home of all the Chinese gods and goddesses who had settled there long before Jove and Juno reached Mount Olympus. Qinghai.

Now the whole sky was lit up. Day. The tops of the mountains were sharp-etched against the light.

I was far from the center of the village, but I could already hear the early-morning excitement of an unusual day.

I turned to make my way back when suddenly I thought that I would go to see Tu's wife. She wouldn't come to the land reform celebration; her sufferings had been too much. After our confrontation and the subsequent trial and conviction of Tu, she had been confined to her bed with a high fever. When that was cured she had gone completely deaf, and now she, like the virgin widow before, lived a life of silence and alienation.

Thrusting my hands deep into my jacket pockets for warmth, I walked with my head down looking at the path in front of me.

Someone's basket brushed my elbow and the person carrying it passed me and walked on ahead. Cotton slippers scuffed till they were grey; socks of blue and green checks. I raised my eyes a little. The back of a dark grey jacket with a large brown patch. Surely I recognized it as belonging to Tu's wife? I looked into her basket. It was empty. I followed her. When we reached her cottage, she slipped the basket from her shoulder, put it on the ground, and stared at it for a long moment. Then she carried it to an empty corner where they used to pile their compost.

Here she tipped it over to add its emptiness to the emptiness already there. With a complacent smile, she stood for a while to admire her work. When she turned to me the smile was still on her face as if frozen into the fine wrinkles that had gathered on the bridge of her nose, at the corners of her eyes and mouth.

I followed her into the room. She didn't show any sign that she recognized me, or even that she was aware of my presence. I wanted to get through to her, wondering how to make her understand me. I stood still and didn't know what to do.

In a corner behind the door of the room was a little pile of potatoes. I picked up a cluster and shook the mud off them. Not a single one resembled the fine, fat potatoes I remembered from my aunt's kitchen. These shriveled spuds were her late autumn harvest, the last until the new year's summer harvest. Potatoes were rated “famine food.” These would have to stave off the pangs of the spring hunger that tormented the peasants every year. And she would face it all by herself. I could not hold up my head. A tearless sob came from deep inside my breast.

She picked up a potato and scrutinized it as carefully as if it were a crystal ball telling her the future. She looked up at me over the top of the root with a look of utter sorrow.

I knew it was useless to reason with her in words. I took her hand in both of mine. I cupped it together with the potato. She did not seem to feel my touch. She had sunk too far into her own dark world.

When I got back to my room, Ma Li was already up and dressed for the festival.

“I thought you had gone ahead,” she said.

“I was with Tu's wife,” I said, dejected. “I wish I could do something for her.”

I stopped as the door opened. Our soprano and our pretty dancer Chu Hua came in with Dai Shi.

This time our reunion was peaceful. In the flush of our success in the land reform, we were loath to find faults. We listened to each other's plans for the future with attentive tolerance. When Dai Shi said she was thinking of going back to Shanghai and writing a play about the land
reform, I asked warmly about it. Only later did I think there was no need for her to invent excuses for not going to Qinghai. When Chu Hua admitted frankly that she could not bear the thought of going to a new, wild place like Qinghai, even stranger than here, Ma Li looked at her pinched face with compassionate understanding.

“I don't feel well,” Chu Hua said. “I'm going to go back to Shanghai and ask for sick leave. I'll stay with my mother for a while.”