Lenin's Kisses (55 page)

He therefore bowed his head and reflected.

The revolutionary asked again, Do you know what crime you have committed?

I do.

What crime?

I wrote four words on the blackboard.

What words?

He looked up at the revolutionary and replied, “Long Live Shi Jingshan.”

The revolutionary started trembling with fury, and proceeded to smash the trial record and ink pot against Shi Jingshan’s face, saying,

If you dare say those words one more time, I’ll shoot you.

Then what should I say?

Figure it out for yourself.

He once again bowed his head and reflected.

The revolutionary asked, Do you know what crime you’ve committed?

I do.

What crime?

I wrote four words on the blackboard.

What words?

The teacher again looked up at the revolutionary, but didn’t answer, and instead he wrote the words
Long Live Shi Jingshan
on the ground with his finger. The revolutionary became so angry that his face turned purple and his entire body started trembling. He said, Fuck you, for you to write this out is even worse than saying it. It is another level of crime.

With the teacher’s initial crime having been compounded with another and another, eventually he would be executed. This happened to be a market day before the autumn harvest, and more than fifty thousand people were attending the mass rally to judge him at the river basin. The river basin was one
li
wide and two
li
long, and the audience’s heads resembled a field of black beans. Furthermore, in front of each person’s head there was a red booklet proving that person’s revolutionary status. The autumn sun was shining down brightly, as warm as a small flame. The people on the sand had come from villages located up to dozens of
li
away, and now they were all crowded into this river basin until it was nearly overflowing, the booklets hanging from their necks appearing as red as a sea of fire. This was unlike anything anyone in attendance had ever seen before, and there wouldn’t be a comparably tumultuous scene in the district until thirty years later, when Liven’s special-skills troupes began touring. Everyone crowded in, standing shoulder to shoulder, like ten thousand horses all neighing together.

It was precisely in these final moments before everything was to begin that Grandma Mao Zhi was tied up by the revolutionaries and carried to the front of the stage. She was not only a woman but a cripple, and they didn’t permit her to bring her crutch. As a result, even though there were two people supporting her, she still walked very unsteadily, like a three-legged grasshopper trying to hop across the stage. As she hopped along, the sign hanging from her neck waved back and forth, and the string holding it rubbed her neck raw. She had just turned forty and her hair was still jet black. She was wearing a dark blue double-breasted coat, and her unkempt hair hung over her shoulders like grass floating on the surface of a pond. On the white sign hanging from her neck were written the words
counterrevolutionary
and
female landowner
and, as though to confirm the accuracy of those labels, the black booklet she had recently received was also hanging there.

As soon as she arrived on stage, the audience was abruptly silenced, as if they had been struck by a club.

Who could have expected that a woman would be brought up on stage, and moreover a cripple?

The interrogation began.

When she was forced to kneel down on the stage, her face was as pale as death and her lips were blue and purple, like two colorful lines drawn on a sheet of white paper. Then, a torrent of questions and answers began streaming from the loudspeakers into the river shoal:

What is your status?

I’m a large landowner.

What crime have you committed?

I am a practicing counterrevolutionary.

Tell us the truth again.

I’m not a Red Army soldier, but I still insist that I was at the revolutionary site of Yan’an. I’m not a descendant of the Revolution, but insist that my parents both participated in the Great Railroad Construction of the
dingmao
Year of the Hare. I’m not a Party member, but insist that when I was in the Red Army I joined the Party. I say that I was in the Red Army, although it is true that I don’t have a Red Army certificate. I say that I was a Party member, though I don’t have a Party certificate. Actually, I am a practicing counterrevolutionary, a large landowner who has hidden in the Balou mountains. Before Liberation, my family owned several dozen
mu
of land, together with several oxen and oxcarts. We also employed many short- and long-term workers. We enjoyed a life in which all we had to do was reach out to get clothing, and open our mouths to get food. As for the Revolution, comrades, look here, I should be executed for my crimes. I should be executed along with Shi Jingshan.

The person then asked her, What did your family eat before Liberation?

We ate whatever we wanted. We had so many steamed buns and dumplings that we fed our pigs with our own leftovers. We wouldn’t even let our workers eat them.

What did you wear?

Silk and gauze. Even the curtains of our horse shed were made not of millet stalks, but rather of the finest silk.

What have you been doing during these years since Liberation?

Day in and day out, I’ve been trying to bring about a restoration, to return to that life of ease that we enjoyed before Liberation.

He didn’t ask her any more questions, but rather shouted to the thousands of people in the audience, saying: What do you say we do about this practicing counterrevolutionary and female landlord?!

The crowd lifted their arms like a forest and shouted in response,

Execute her! . . . Execute her!

That raucous response determined the path of her fate.
³
After interrogating the teacher named Shi Heidou or Shi Jingshan, who had been teaching at the school for only three days, they dragged him to the riverside to execute him, at which point they dragged her away as well. Mao Zhi was told to kneel down next to him in front of a fresh grave, their backs supported by the sort of wooden placards normally used by people facing execution. The sun was shining down brightly. The sky was an endless expanse of blue, without a trace of clouds. The corn planted on the riverbank should have already been separated and laid out to dry. The air was full of the bright fragrance of corn, together with the smell of sweat from the crowds.

When it came time for the revolutionaries to open fire, Teacher Shi Jingshan, who was only twenty-two, was so terrified he collapsed next to the pit like a pile of mud, the stench of feces and urine emanating from his body. As for the middle-aged Mao Zhi, her pallor suddenly disappeared, as did the green and purple tint of her lips. She knelt there as calmly as someone tired from walking who had decided to rest for a while.

The revolutionary approached the young man who was about to die and asked, Do you have any final requests?

He trembled and replied, I do.

The revolutionary said, Tell me.

He replied, My wife is about to give birth. Could you give her a message? Tell her that after the child is born, she should be sure to render it either deaf or crippled. Then, she should take the child to a village deep in the Balou mountains, where it is said that everyone is disabled, and consequently there is no district, county, or commune that wants this village or pays any attention to it. The people of this village eat what they sow, enjoying a heavenly life of relaxation and livening. Please tell my wife and child to go there.

The revolutionary standing behind him laughed coldly.

Mao Zhi gazed at the young man, and wanted to say something to him, but the revolutionary walked up to her and asked, Do you have anything you’d like to say?

She replied, Yes.

The revolutionary said, Then spit it out.

She said, After I die, please go to the village of Liven deep in the Balou mountains and tell the disabled villagers living there that they can forget anything else they want, but they mustn’t forget about the need to withdraw from society and return to a life where no one has any control over us.

After she finished, the young man kneeling beside her turned and stared at her in amazement. Just as he was about to ask her something, however, the gun went off behind him and he fell into the pit like a sackful of grain. Drops of blood splattered onto Mao Zhi’s face and all over the ground.

As for Mao Zhi, she of course survived. It turned out that she had merely been brought over to kneel next to the young man. After the gun went off, she shuddered as if someone had shoved her from behind, and for a moment she seemed as though she were about to fall into the pit as well. But the shove was fairly light, and in the end she merely swayed back and forth while remaining in a kneeling position.

Mao Zhi spent the next half month sweeping the streets in front of the commune. By the time she was given permission to return to the village, it had gained two new members—a young woman and the infant to whom she’d just given birth a few days earlier. The child was born a wholer, but somehow had become paralyzed. The woman had explained that no matter what, she simply
had
to come live in Liven, to become a resident of the village. She said that ever since she was a child she had known how to embroider, and could embroider a flower on a sheet made from cowhide. She said that if she was allowed to stay, she would be happy to embroider whatever other families needed.

The woman settled down in Liven, and Mao Zhi gave her a red booklet, which she hung from her neck every day like an amulet.

However, this red booklet brought a disaster of its own. Although this disaster was different from that of the black booklets, the suffering it induced was in no way inferior. One day followed the next, and Mao Zhi could often be seen sweeping the streets of Boshuzi and being struggled against. But in the village they continued to assign her the same number of work points and issue her the same number of daily grain rations as before. When Mao Zhi returned to the village, she was respected by everyone. When her neighbors—including the families of the deaf man and the blind man, together with the wholers in the families of the deaf-mute and the idiot—saw that she had returned, they all wanted to come over to her house to pay their regards, and to take away her tasty buns and rice. They provided earnuts
⁵
that they were originally going to use as seeds, and somehow managed to come up with some peaches and chestnuts that had been hidden away.

On behalf of the other villagers, Mao Zhi voluntarily assumed the consequences of the black disasters and black crimes. As a result, everyone else was able to enjoy a good fortune, and came to regard her as an even more important personage. But two or three years later, the entire land needed to be divided into lattice fields,
⁷
and the commune sent everyone who had been issued a red booklet to a ridge outside the Balou mountain range. There, they were assigned to different hills based on which village they belonged to. All of the residents of Liven were naturally sent to the same hill. The Revolution didn’t care whether or not you were disabled; all it cared about was how many red booklets you had accepted from the revolutionaries. People with one red booklet had to build, in the course of a single winter, two
mu
of lattice fields. Liven had thirty-nine households that each had a single red booklet, and therefore they were expected to build at least thirty-nine
mu
of lattice fields.

In this way, the forced labor of the red disaster and red crime began. It seemed as though every hill throughout the land had villagers living on it, and they were all planting their red flags and posting their red slogans. The entire land became as red as if it were ablaze, and everywhere there was the sound of pickaxes striking the ground and shovels leveling the dirt, and everywhere there was the sound of iron being pounded in furnaces used to make more shovels and pickaxes.

Needless to say, every household in Liven dispatched people to live and work on that barren slope. Because the land was distributed based on red booklets, which in turn were distributed based on household status, each household was given two
mu
of land to be converted into lattice fields by the end of winter. Each household was responsible for figuring out a way of accomplishing this, and this was true regardless of how disabled the household might be—whether the household had five members of whom three were blind, or seven members of whom five were crippled, or three members of whom the only wholer was merely a child.