Lenin's Kisses (3 page)

Most of Zhang Guotao’s injured troops either died or simply disappeared after he ordered them to return home, but Mao Zhi managed to survive by hiding in an open grave. She subsequently lost contact with the army and had to resort to begging for alms. When she arrived at the Balou mountains and saw the disabled people living in Liven, she decided to stay with them. The gazetteer reports that while there was no record of Mao Zhi’s having officially joined the Red Army, everyone in Liven—and throughout the entire county—regarded her as a bona fide revolutionary leader. Thanks to her, therefore, Balou came to have glory, Liven came to have direction, and the villagers, despite being physically disabled, were able to live happy and fulfilled lives in the new society.

When this local gazetteer was revised and published in the
gengshen
Year of the Monkey, 1980, the section on Mao Zhi reported that she and the other villagers were content. In this way, the village of Liven truly lived up to its name.

7)
Site
. D
IAL
. Place, location.
That site:
That place, that location.

C
HAPTER 3:
T
HE VILLAGERS OF
L
IVEN BECOME BUSY AGAIN

Heavens! The snow fell continuously for seven days—seven long days that virtually killed off the sun.

These seven days of hot snow transformed summer into winter.

Once the snow finally began to taper off, some villagers tried to begin harvesting the wheat. Rather than using sickles, they lifted the wheat stalks out of the snow with their bare hands and snipped off the ears with scissors. They placed the wheat in a bag or basket, which they carried to the front of the field.

The first person to head into the fields that day was Jumei, leading three of her surtwin
¹
daughters—her three little nins.
³
They spread out with their crates, bags, and wicker baskets like flowers in a field of grass—each reaching one hand into the deep snow to pull out the ears of wheat, and then snipping them off with a pair of scissors in the other hand.

All of the villagers, including those who were blind or crippled, followed Jumei’s lead and went to harvest their own snow-covered wheat.

Everyone was very busy on this snow day.

The people gathering wheat were scattered like a herd of sheep through the white hills, and the clicking of their scissors echoed crisply across the snow-covered landscape.

Jumei’s family plot was positioned against the wall of the gorge, abutting two adjacent plots and opening onto a path that led up to Balou’s Spirit Mountain. Her several-
mu
-large plot was oddly shaped, but was basically a large square. Jumei’s eldest daughter, Tonghua, was blind. She never went to work in the fields, and instead would sit in a corner of the courtyard for a while after each meal before eventually going back inside. She had never ventured beyond the entrance to the village, where the path up to the ridge began, and regardless of where she went, all she could see was an indistinct haze. At high noon, she could see a light pink sheet. She didn’t actually know that what she was seeing was the color pink, and instead described it as being like running her hand through muddy water. In the end, however, what she saw was basically pink.

Tonghua didn’t know that snow is white, or that water is clear. She didn’t know that tree leaves turn green in the spring, turn yellow in autumn, then fall off and turn white in winter. Accordingly, she was expected only to dress and feed herself, and paid scant attention to this hot blizzard in the middle of the sweltering summer. Meanwhile, Jumei’s second and third daughters, Huaihua and Yuhua, together with her youngest, Mothlet, all followed their mother like a flock of chicks to harvest the snow-covered wheat.

The landscape was completely transformed. A pristine white sheet covered the mountains and valleys, broken only by a river that, from above, appeared as black as oil. Jumei and her daughters were harvesting wheat in those snow-covered fields, their hands red from the cold even as their foreheads were covered with a sheen of perspiration.

It was, after all, still summer.

Jumei led her daughters through the rows. They resembled a three-pronged wheat drill, and left the snow-covered field looking as though it had been the site of a cock- or dogfight. Some neighbors came over the ridge, and one, upon seeing the piles of wheat along the path, called out to Jumei:

“Old Ju, I want to come over to your place this year to borrow some grain. . . .”

She responded, “If there is any left, you are certainly welcome to have some.”

Another added, “If you don’t have any to spare, you could always simply marry out one of your daughters.”

Jumei smiled happily, but didn’t reply.

The neighbors returned to harvest the wheat in their own fields.

The entire snow-covered ridge became a swarm of activity. If a blind man’s family found itself shorthanded, even the blind man would need to go to the fields and help out. A sighted person would lead him there, pull a wheat stalk out of the snow, and place it in his hand; and in this way the blind man would make his way down the row until there were no more stalks, and then would turn around and head back. Cripples and paraplegics also had to work in the fields just like wholers.
⁵
They would sit on a slick wooden board, and each time they cut a handful of wheat they would nudge their body forward, sliding the board along with them. In this way, they were able to move through the snow even faster than wholers. Those who didn’t have a board would instead use a wicker dustpan, pulling themselves over the snow along the ridges on the underside of the pan. The deaf-mutes were not impeded from working, and given that they could neither speak nor hear they therefore had less to distract them, and consequently were able to work even faster and more diligently than everyone else.

By noon, the entire ridge was suffused with the scent of freshly cut wheat.

When Jumei and her daughters reached the other end of the field, they saw three men waiting there for them. These men were wholers from the city, and they whispered to each other as they gazed out over the snow-covered fields. The snowy wilderness muffled the sound of their voices, the way a well might swallow an errant snowflake. Jumei said, “Go see what they are doing.” Before these words had even left her mouth—and before Huaihua had a chance to respond—Mothlet had risen up out of the white snow and glided over to the ridge.

Huaihua said, “Mothlet, you’re like a spirit.”

Mothlet looked back and said, “Sis, are you hoping that I die and return as a ghost?”

Mothlet appeared to float like an insect or sparrow. Her tiny figure startled the men, one of whom stepped forward and knelt down before her.

“How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

“How tall are you?”

She became bashful. “Mind your own business.”

He laughed. “You look like you’re only about three feet tall.”

She retorted angrily, “
You’re
the one who is only three feet tall.”

He chuckled as he patted her head, and told her that he was the township chief. He gestured to the other two men, explaining that one was the county chief and the other was his secretary. He asked her to go find whoever was in charge of the village and have that person come over—telling her to say that the township chief had personally come to investigate the hardships the village had suffered.

Mothlet laughed and replied, “Grandma Mao Zhi is my grandmother, and my mother is right over there gathering wheat.”

The township chief gazed at her with an odd expression, then laughed. “Really?”

She replied, “Really.”

The township chief turned to look at the county chief, who had gone pale. The corners of his mouth were twitching, as though something was either tugging at his heart or pulling at his face. He slowly shifted his gaze from the top of Mothlet’s head over to the vast snow-covered region next to the mountain, whereupon his face gradually reverted back to its normal hue.

The county chief’s baby-faced secretary was tall and slender, and he kept staring at Yuhua and, particularly, Huaihua—whose svelte physique was accentuated by a bright red sweater that made her look like a flame blazing in the snow. As a result, he never managed to shift his gaze over to Mothlet, who intuited what he was thinking and glared at him angrily. She eventually called out over her shoulder,

“Ma, someone’s asking after you—he’s looking for Grandma!”

Mothlet fluttered mothlike back to the field.

The other girls all turned toward their mother, as though it were unprecedented and somehow inappropriate for someone to come looking for her. Jumei’s front pockets were stuffed full of wheat, making her look as though she were pregnant. She lumbered forward, removed the bag of grain from her shoulders, and laid it down in the snow. She then wiped the sweat from her brow with her ice-cold hands and stared at Mothlet.

“Who is that over on the ridge?”

“It is the township chief, the county chief, and his secretary.”

Jumei briefly felt faint, but immediately recovered her composure. Even though she had already wiped her brow, sweat began to pour out like vapor erupting from a steamer. She stood up and used her hand to support the bag of wheat hanging from her chest. Gazing at her daughters, she said coldly,

“They are cadres—cadres looking for your grandmother.”

When Huaihua heard that it was the county and township chiefs, her face initially froze in disbelief, then erupted in joy. It goes without saying that these little nins all resembled one another, but if you looked carefully you would notice that Huaihua was fairer and more distinctive-looking than her sisters. She, too, recognized this, and therefore always tried to take the lead. She stared back at the men on the ridge for a long time, then turned to her mother and said, “Ma, Grandma is crazy. If it really is the county chief, wouldn’t it be better for you to go see him instead? Why don’t you. I’ll go with you.”

Mothlet said to Huaihua, “If the visitors say we should get Grandma, then she must not be crazy after all.”

Jumei sent Mothlet back to the village to look for the girls’ grandmother.

Huaihua continued to gaze at the ridge, but appeared disappointed. She kicked the snow several times, blushing anxiously.

The girls’ grandmother was the heroic Grandma Mao Zhi described in the county gazetteer, and she was now hobbling with Mothlet across the field. By this point Grandma Mao Zhi was already in her seventies and had gone through several dozen crutches—though she, unlike the other villagers, used hospital-style crutches consisting of two white aluminum tubes screwed together to yield a pair of perfectly proportioned tubes, with a rubber stopper fastened to one end to keep them from slipping, and several layers of cloth wrapped around the other end, which rested comfortably in her armpit. No one else in the village had such nice crutches, and at best they used canes fashioned from willow or pagoda tree branches, from which a carpenter had sawed off the tip, chiseled a hole in the side, and then nailed it together with a wooden or iron nail.

Grandma Mao Zhi’s crutches not only were attractive and durable but also granted her a sense of dignity and authority. Whenever there was a crisis, all she had to do was tap the ground with her crutch and everything would immediately be resolved. For instance, when the township government had sent several imposing wholers to the village of Liven to demand that everyone pay a hundred-yuan transportation tax, hadn’t those men immediately turned back the instant Grandma Mao Zhi brandished her crutch at them? And the winter that the government tried to make everyone in Liven pay two pounds
of cotton in taxes, wasn’t it Grandma Mao Zhi who’d removed her cotton jacket and thrown it in their faces and then, standing before them with her sagging breasts, demanded indignantly, “Is this enough? If not, I’ll also take off my pants,” and before they could react had begun to unfasten her belt?

The officials had exclaimed, “Grandma Mao Zhi, what on earth are you doing?”

She’d waved her crutch at them. “If you want to collect cotton, I’ll take off my cotton pants right here and now, and hand them to you.”

The officials had dodged her crutch and departed.

Grandma Mao Zhi’s crutch was her weapon, and now she was alternately leaning on it and pulling it out of the snow. She hobbled along behind Mothlet, followed by two crippled dogs she had adopted. By this point, everyone in the village knew that the county and township chiefs had come to investigate the crisis. Given that the Balou region had endured a hot snow that had fallen for seven straight days and left more than a foot of accumulation that completely buried the wheat crop, it was only natural that the government would come investigate the villagers’ hardships, comfort them, and offer them money, grain, eggs, sugar, and cloth.

Administratively, the village of Liven belonged to the county of Shuanghuai, and the township of Boshuzi.