Frog (9 page)

I made my way over to the three storage sheds for gate boards on the western edge of the sluice gate. By wedging my toes in the spaces between bricks and grabbing hold of the eaves, I pulled myself up until I made it onto one of the roofs, all the way to the central ridge, from where I could see throngs of people and more red flags than I could count. I was nearly blinded by sunlight off of the river ice. Dozens of people were hunched over just west of the stage, all with their heads lowered. I knew who they were: the commune’s evil ox-ghosts and snake-demons waiting to be hauled up on the stage to be hounded by the masses. Xiao Shangchun was bellowing into a microphone. The one-time down-on-his-luck granary watchman could never have dreamed that such a position would one day be his. But at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, as rebel leader, he had created a title for himself: Windstorm Rebel Corps Commander.

He was wearing an old army uniform turned white from too many launderings and made whole with dark patches; a red armband circled his bicep. His hair was so thin the scalp glistened in the sunlight. He affected the speech of big-shot characters we’d all seen in movies: drawing out his words, one hand on his hip, the other making all sorts of gestures. The loudspeakers made his voice loud enough to burst eardrums, overlaying the sound of waves crashing onto a rocky shore created by the masses, and caused by disturbances here one minute, there the next. I began to worry about the safety of my mother and other oldsters who were there. I tried to spot them in the crowd, but the glare from the ice was too bright. Bitter winds cut through my tattered coat and chilled me to the bone.

Xiao Shangchun waved his hand, and a dozen hulking men with clubs and sporting Security bands around their arms came out from behind the stage. They jumped down and began to quiet the boisterous crowd with clubs that had red cloths tied to the ends, making them look like torches. One young fellow, who was hit over the head, angrily tried to take the club away, and received a nasty poke in the ribs for his effort. Wherever these ruthless crowd controllers wielded their clubs, the people meekly made way, as Xiao Shangchun’s shrill voice sliced through the loudspeakers: Sit down, everyone! Sit down! Drag out the troublemakers.

The young man targeted by one security enforcer was yanked out of the crowd by his hair . . . the masses finally quieted down, some on their haunches, others seated, but no one on their feet. Like scarecrows in the field, the enforcers stood evenly spaced amid the crowd of people.

Bring the ox-ghosts and snake-demons up on the stage! Xiao Shangchun commanded. The miscreants’ feet never touched the ground as they were bundled up onto the stage.

I saw Gugu among them.

She did not go meekly. Every time one of the men pushed her head down, she defiantly raised it as soon as the hand was taken away. Her defiance only increased the pressure the next time, and in the end she was knocked to her knees; one of the security men put his foot on her back. Some members of the crowd hopped up onto the stage to shout slogans, but they evoked no echoing response from the people below. Finding their shouts ineffective, the sloganeers slipped back down into the crowd. Just then, a piercing wail exploded from somewhere in their midst. It was my mother’s howl of anguish: My poor suffering sister . . . have you horrid beasts no conscience at all . . .

Xiao Shangchun ordered his men to take all the other ox-ghosts and snake-demons off the stage and leave Gugu alone up there. The enforcer kept his foot on her back and struck a valiant pose. This was a demonstration of the popular slogan: Knock the class enemies to their knees and step on them when they’re down. When I saw that Gugu wasn’t moving, I worried she might be dead. My mother’s howls had faded away, and I thought she might be dead too.

The remaining ox-ghosts and snake-demons were herded over to a large poplar tree, where they were guarded by a security team armed with rifles. The detainees sat on the ground, heads lowered, unmoving as clay statues. Huang Qiuya’s head was resting against a brick wall, half of it shaved to make her not only ugly, but terrifyingly so. I’d been told that during the early days of the movement, Gugu had been one of the founders of the Norman Bethune Combat Brigade in the local health system. Like a fanatic, she’d shown no kindness to the director who had once been her protector, and she had treated Huang Qiuya with unprecedented cruelty. I knew this had been a survival measure, like a night traveller whistling past a graveyard out of fear. The old director, a decent man who’d found the bullying and humiliation intolerable, had killed himself by jumping down a well. Huang Qiuya, on the other hand, had responded to the imprecations of her antagonist by producing evidence of Gugu’s concealed relationship with the turncoat Wang Xiaoti, revealing that she had often cried out his name in her sleep at night, and divulging that when she came off duty one night, she discovered that her colleague, Wan Xin, was not in the dormitory; she wondered where an unmarried young woman could be that late. As she was weighing the possibilities, she saw three red signal flares soar up out of a grove of willow trees on the bank of the Jiao River and heard the roar of an aeroplane engine high overhead. Not long after that, a figure slinked back into the dormitory, and she recognised who it was – Wan Xin. Huang said she reported the incident to the director, but the capitalist roader was in cahoots with Wan Xin and suppressed her report. There was no doubt, she said, that Wan Xin was a secret agent for the Kuomintang, and this incident was serious enough to cost her her life. But she wasn’t finished. She also said that Gugu had engaged in trysts with the capitalist roader Yang Lin in the county seat, resulting in a pregnancy that Huang herself had aborted. The masses were a repository of rich creativity, but also a repository of evil imagination. Huang Qiuya’s revelation of Gugu’s two major crimes easily satisfied the people’s emotional needs; Gugu’s refusal to admit to any of it and her steadfast defiance further guaranteed fireworks at every denouncement session, and constituted a monstrous episode in the history of Northeast Township.

I gazed down from my rooftop perch at Huang Qiuya’s weird half-bald head and my loathing was tempered by sympathy, confusion, fear and grief. I picked up a shard of tile and took aim at that head. I could have hit it with ease. But I hesitated, and in the end did not throw it. Years later I told Gugu what I’d thought of doing. I’m glad you didn’t, she said. That would have made things even worse for me. In her later years Gugu believed she’d been guilty of terrible, unforgiveable things. I thought she was being too hard on herself, convinced that she was no worse than anyone who lived during those times. You don’t understand . . . The note of sorrow in her voice was palpable.

Yang Lin was dragged up onto the stage. The man whose foot was on my aunt’s back moved away so they could pick her up and stand her next to Yang, where their heads were pushed down, they were forced to crouch, and their arms were yanked behind them, a contrived position to resemble the wings on Wang Xiaoti’s Jian-5 aircraft. I looked down at Yang Lin’s exposed scalp. Six months earlier, he had been the next thing to a god, someone who had reached unparalleled heights, and we had entertained hopes that he and Gugu might marry someday, even though he was more than twenty years older, and even though she would be a replacement for his recently deceased first wife. But he was the Party secretary, a high-ranking cadre with a monthly income of over a hundred yuan, a big shot who visited the villages in a green Jeep, accompanied by an assistant and bodyguards.

I only met him once, Gugu said years afterward. I found his big belly – easily the size of a pregnant woman in her eighth month – repulsive and was turned off by his foul garlic breath – he was as rustic as they come – but I’d have married him. For all of you, for the family, I’d have married him. The day after she met Yang in the county seat, she said, the commune Party secretary, Qin Shan, made an inspection tour of the health centre and, in the company of the director, came to the obstetrics ward, all smiles and honeyed words, a living, breathing slave. In the past, she said, Qin Shan had strutted around, high and mighty, but he had abruptly turned into the man she was looking at now, and she didn’t know what to make of that. I’d have married the man to spite all those petty people, if not for the Cultural Revolution.

A squat, stocky female Red Guard walked up with two pairs of worn-out shoes and draped one around the neck of Yang Lin, the other around Gugu’s neck. I could bear up under the labels of counter-revolutionary and special agent, Gugu said, but not harlot, not ever. It was an insult they concocted to disgrace me. She reached up, took the shoes off, and flung them away. As if they had eyes, they landed at the feet of Huang Qiuya. The Red Guard jumped up, grabbed a handful of Gugu’s hair, and pulled her head down. Gugu jerked her head back up to defy the girl. Lower your head, Gugu, I warned silently. If you don’t, she might rip your hair out and take some of your scalp with it. That girl has to weigh a hundred kilos or more. She’s holding onto your hair with both hands, actually hanging from you. Gugu shook her head like a wild horse tossing its mane, and the girl, who held onto the hair, lost her balance, bringing Gugu down to the stage floor with her, a tuft of loose hair in each hand. Gugu’s head started to bleed – she still has a pair of coin-sized scars there – the blood running down her forehead and into her ear. She held her body rigid. The crowd was deathly silent. A mule hitched to a wagon raised its head and split the air with a loud bray. I didn’t hear Mother howl; my mind was a blank.

As that was happening, Huang Qiuya picked the worn shoes up off the ground in front of her, trotted over, and went up onto the stage. I assumed she didn’t know what had just happened, because she wouldn’t have done what she did otherwise. She froze when she saw the scene in front of her, dropped the shoes, and backed up, mumbling something. Xiao Shangchun strode up onto the stage. Wan Xin, he bellowed, how arrogant can you be! With wild gestures, he tried leading the people in shouted slogans to change the atmosphere. But no one below the stage joined in. The fat girl flung away the two handfuls of hair, as if they were snakes, and began to blubber as she stumbled off the stage.

Stay where you are! Xiao ordered Huang Qiuya, who was slowly backing up. He pointed at the worn shoes. You, he said, put those around her neck.

The blood had run down Gugu’s ear onto her neck and past her brows into her eyes. She rubbed her face with one hand.

Huang picked up the shoes and walked unsteadily up to Gugu, where she stopped and looked into her face. With a garbled shriek, she began foaming at the mouth and fell backward.

Red Guards rushed up and dragged her off the stage like a dead dog.

Xiao Shangchun grabbed Yang Lin by the collar and pulled it back to straighten him up.

Yang’s arms hung loose at his sides, his legs buckled, and he went limp. If Xiao let go, he’d have collapsed in a heap.

Being stubborn is Wan Xin’s road to Hell, Xiao said. She won’t come clean, so you do it. Leniency to those who confess, severity to those who refuse! Tell us, did you and she have an adulterous affair?

Yang Lin held his tongue.

Xiao waved a hulking man up to join him and give Yang a dozen vicious slaps across the face, loud cracks that reached the tips of the trees. Some white things landed on the stage; I guessed they were teeth. Yang began to lurch and would have fallen if the man hadn’t grabbed his collar to hold him up.

Did you or didn’t you? Speak up.

Yes . . .

How many times?

Just once . . .

The truth!

Twice . . .

You’re lying!

Three times . . . four . . . ten . . . many times . . . I can’t recall . . .

With a spine-tingling screech, Gugu jumped up and threw herself at Yang like a lioness taking down her prey. Yang fell heavily to the floor, where Gugu scratched his face relentlessly. Several ferocious security men had to work hard to pry her off of Yang’s body.

At that moment, strange noises on the lake emerged as the ice began to crack, and people fell into the freezing water.

Dear Sugitani Akihito sensei,

Your willingness to spend so much of your valuable time reading a long letter it took me two months to finish so I could save money on postage and then to offer so much encouragement and positive feedback has both moved and made me feel guilty.

What caused a welter of feelings was learning that Pingdu Garrison Commander Sugitani during Japan’s invasion of China was your father. Because of that, you represented your deceased father by apologising for his offences to my aunt, my family, and the people of my hometown. Your attitude in facing up to history and assuming responsibility for certain actions moved us deeply. Apparently, you too were a victim of the war. In your letter you wrote about how you and your mother suffered fearful pangs of anxiety throughout the war and debilitating cold and hunger when it was over. If you want the truth, your father was a victim too. As you have said, if there had been no war, he would have been a surgeon with a brilliant future. The war changed all that; his life and his nature would never be the same again. A one-time saver of lives, he became a taker of lives.

I read your letter to my aunt, to my father, and to many of the people here who lived through the war. They reacted emotionally, even tearfully. You were no more than four or five years old when your father was the Pingdu Garrison Commander, and you are not culpable for his crimes. But you shouldered his crimes and demonstrated a willingness to expiate them for him. By doing so, you have endeared yourself to us, for we know how precious that sort of attitude is. It is an attitude too seldom seen in today’s world. If all people could reflect on history and on their own lives, mankind would not display so much idiotic behaviour.

My aunt, my father, and my fellow townspeople are eager to welcome you again as a guest to Northeast Gaomi Township
.
My aunt would like to accompany you on a visit to Pingdu city. She took me aside to tell me that she harbours no ill will towards your father. There is no denying that there were many cruel, vicious, and ill-mannered Japanese officers who participated in the invasion of China, the sort we see in movies about the war, but there were also cultured officers, like your father, who treated people with courtesy. My aunt judged your father this way: He was far from the worst of the lot.

I returned to Gaomi in June, more than a month ago. While here I’ve done a bit of research for the play I plan to write, focusing on my aunt. I’ve also continued relating the story of Gugu’s life in letter form, as you asked me to do, and, as you requested, included in those letters as many of my own experiences as possible.

My aunt and my father have asked me to pass on their regards to you and your family.

Northeast Gaomi Township welcomes you!

Tadpole

July 2003, Gaomi