Lenin's Kisses (42 page)

Mao Zhi and the stonemason stood in their doorway in the moonlight, watching as the thieves disappeared into the night like water flowing through your fingers. They saw that there were four or five people leading the village’s yellow ox, and as they walked past Mao Zhi she hobbled out to the middle of the street and grabbed the ox’s reins, saying, Leave the ox here! Tomorrow, the big brigade and production brigade will still need to plow the fields! One of the people looked at her, then kicked her good leg, knocking her over. She crawled forward and hugged his leg, saying, You can’t treat us like this; we are all members of the Boshuzi commune! The person responded, What do we care about being members of the commune? When people are starving to death, what does it matter whether or not you are a member? Then he led the ox away, even as Mao Zhi continued grasping his leg. So he stopped and kicked her good leg again. At this point, Mao Zhi’s husband ran over from the doorway and knelt down before the wholer, clasping his hands and bowing. He pleaded, Please don’t beat her. She is crippled, and only has that one good leg. If you want to beat someone, then beat me.

The man said, Is she your wife? Tell your wife to let go of my leg.

The stonemason kowtowed to the man and said, Please leave us the ox. If we don’t have an ox, then how will we plow the fields next year?

The man kicked Mao Zhi’s good leg again.

Mao Zhi screamed in pain, and grasped his leg even more tightly than before. The stonemason kowtowed more quickly and more urgently, and begged, Could you please beat me instead? Could you please beat me? My wife was at Yan’an, and contributed to the Revolution. She helped establish the new society. The wholer looked at the stonemason, then back at Mao Zhi. Grinding his teeth, he said, Blast your grandmother. It is all your fault that society has gotten messed up. If it hadn’t been for the Revolution, our family would still have our ox and two
mu
of land. Thanks to your Revolution, we were designated as a rich peasant family and consequently lost both our ox and our land. During the famine, three out of the five members of my family starved to death. As he was saying this, he kicked Mao Zhi a couple of times more and said, You woman, you weren’t content to lead your own life, and instead had to carry out your fucking Revolution. I’ll revolutionize you, that’s what I’ll do. I’ll submit
you
to the Revolution! Saying this, he kicked Mao Zhi several more times in the belly.

Mao Zhi stared in shock, then loosened her grip on his leg.

The wholer snorted, then led the ox away with the other men. After they had proceeded several steps, he turned around and said, Granny, if you all hadn’t carried out your Revolution, we wouldn’t be having this famine. After saying this, he angrily left the village and went back up the mountain ridge.

The village gradually settled down.

The last group of wholers to leave the village were despondently muttering to themselves, saying: I didn’t manage to get anything. Fuck her grandmother, I didn’t manage to get anything. It was unclear, however, whether they were cursing the people of Liven or the other wholers, who had not left them any grain to steal.

The sun rose.

The village was quiet. There were no cocks crowing, oxen lowing, or ducks squawking.

Throughout the village there were empty baskets and sacks, and the ground was covered with corn and wheat, together with stamped and signed letters of introduction from the commune.

The sun came up just as it always had, shining down on the mountain ridge, on the village, and on each courtyard. The sparkling red government stamps that adorned those letters of introduction were like beautiful flowers. Someone came out of his house and stood in his doorway, and immediately the other villagers—young and old, including the blind, deaf, mute, and crippled, as well as wholers—all came out of their homes and stood silently in their respective doorways, gazing at one another. Their faces were calm, without a trace of sorrow or grief. Instead, they were all completely impassive as they regarded one another with frozen expressions.

After a while, one of the deaf men said, My family doesn’t have a single handful of grain. We are starving to death, and even the jar of millet we had hidden beneath the bed was taken away. One of the blind men said to the deaf man, Someone said that our family didn’t need light, and therefore they even took our oil lamp. That lamp was made of bronze, and the next time there is a steel shortage, our family won’t have anything to contribute.

At this point, the villagers noticed Mao Zhi walking, her limp even more pronounced than before. She grasped her crutch, and with every step it looked as though she was about to collapse. Her face was ashen and her hair looked as though she hadn’t combed it for eight hundred years. She had aged visibly overnight, her face as wrinkled as a spiderweb and her hair having turned gray. She stood beneath the honey locust tree, beneath where the oxcart wheel bell used to hang, and gazed at the people who lined both sides of the street. The villagers began walking toward her, as they had done when she used to hold meetings there. They crowded around and waited.

At this point, the voice of the daughter of that seventy-seven-year-old crippled man rang out from the back of the village. Her hoarse voice sounded like the wind blowing unevenly through the branches of a tree. She jumped up and down, slapping her thighs and shouting,

“Come quickly! My grandfather has died, and is lying in the grain pit beneath the bed! . . . Come quickly, My grandfather has died of anger, and is lying in the grain pit under the bed!”

That seventy-seven-year-old man had died. He died inside the pit where his family stored its grain. Next to the pit there was a letter demanding grain, which bore a stamp from the people’s commune, together with another from the People’s committee. Mao Zhi led the villagers to the side of the pit, where she picked up the letter. It turned out the old man was actually still alive, and he used his last breath to say,

“Mao Zhi, let the people of Liven withdraw from society. Liven should never have been part of this commune, or this province.”

After saying this, the old man finally died.

After he died, he was buried.

After he was buried, the people of Liven began to endure a full-fledged famine.

For the first few days, families didn’t leave their homes. Instead, they conserved their energy so as to retard the starvation process. A few days later, some people began going out—heading up the mountain to look for roots. Later, they started stripping bark from the trees to eat, as the people beyond the mountain did. After stripping off the outer layer of dry bark, they would remove the inner layer of living bark and take it home to boil into a glutinous soup. They continued like this for half a month, until all of the grass roots on the mountain had been dug up and the elm trees were all stripped of their bark, and then some people began eating dirt from the mountain itself.

People began starving to death.

One person died after another.

New graves began to appear in the village cemetery. After another half a month, those graves began sprouting like bamboo shoots after a spring shower, and eventually an array of graves as vast as a wheat field appeared in the front of the village. When unmarried young people died, they could not be buried in the ancestral plots, and therefore were buried at the head of the village.

When children under the age of five or so starved to death, it wasn’t deemed worthwhile to buy them a coffin, and instead they were wrapped in a reed mat and placed in a bamboo basket, which would then either be thrown into the ravine beyond the village or placed next to a pile of rocks along the mountain ridge.

The sky was an expanse of blue and the mountain was perfectly still. The village of Liven was left behind in that expanse of blue, like a pile of grass or some historical relic. Eagles were screeching overhead, and would swoop down and stand in front of those bamboo baskets with children’s corpses inside. The children’s parents would initially watch over the baskets, and would strike the eagles with bamboo sticks. After a few days, however, they stopped guarding the baskets, since they were so hungry they couldn’t leave the house. As a result, the eagles and wild dogs became very busy. A few days later, even the children’s own parents went somewhere else to look for food, leaving behind the baskets on an expanse of wild grass.

Afterward, these empty basket was joined by many others. The area became a barren field, an amusement park for eagles, wild dogs, wolves, and foxes.

The sound of sobbing from Liven did not increase, but the gravestones and empty baskets on the mountain did. As winter ended and spring approached, the weather became warmer, and in the village some people slowly started to emerge from their houses, standing in the sunlight in front of their front doors. They would say a few words to their neighbors, and would talk about only one thing. They would mention how, in the past, life in the village had been one of livening and comfort, and how it was only after Mao Zhi led them to join the co-op, and then led them to join the people’s commune, that they encountered this once-in-a-millennium disaster. They said that since it had been Mao Zhi who arranged for the village to enter society, she must now help them withdraw, so they might once again return to the life that they had been enjoying. They said that if the village hadn’t entered society, people from outside wouldn’t have even known there was this gorge in the Balou mountains, in which there was a village where disabled people lived a happy and carefree life all year long, with plenty of clothing and abundant grain. To the extent that the outside world had known about the existence of this village, Shuanghuai county believed that Liven belonged to Dayu county, Dayu believed it belonged to Gaoliu, and Gaoliu believed it belonged to Shuanghuai.

If they were permitted to withdraw from society, they said, they would never again fall under the jurisdiction of another county or commune, and would live carefree and enlivened lives. Who, under those circumstances, would be able to bring a letter of introduction and demand grain? Who would have ever thought to go plunder Liven? They said that all of this was Mao Zhi’s fault, and it was because she brought the village into the commune and into the county, that they were now suffering from the present famine.

They resolved to go together to her house.

The called out at her door, and when it opened they saw her unsteadily emerge. Like everyone else’s, her face was swollen and had a greenish tint. They saw that in the courtyard in front of her kitchen, there was a basin half-filled with water, in which was soaking the bag the stonemason used to carry his hammer and chisel. The stonemason’s bag was made from cowhide, and after being soaked in water it could be boiled and eaten. Every day Mao Zhi would cut several strips from the cloth, soak them in water, dip them in salt, boil them, and then feed them to her daughter.

Mao Zhi stood there, seeing the villagers angrily assembled in front of her. Even the stonemason’s own cousin was in the crowd. She realized something was about to happen, and the greenish tint in her face immediately turned ashen. She asked, You have all come? What do you want?

The villagers calmed down. Speaking on behalf of the crowd, the stonemason’s cousin said, Sister, every family in the village has someone that has starved to death. They are concerned about you and your family, so they came to see you.

A smile came to Mao Zhi’s lips, as she said, Thank you, thank you for thinking of our family.

The cousin then said, Sister, there is another thing I should mention. Everyone remembers the livened life we used to lead. Sister, if you are still able to walk, could you go down to the commune and county seat and arrange it so that Liven might return to the way things used to be, when we didn’t have to listen to any commune or county?

Mao Zhi continued smiling, but began to look uncomfortable.

The cripple who was forced to hand over his ox at gunpoint when Liven joined the cooperative society asked, Why shouldn’t we be able to do this? When we originally entered society none of the three surrounding counties even wanted us.

The one-eyed woman whose plow was confiscated under the angry command of the district chief when they joined the commune said, Sister, when we entered society you had said that this would allow the people of Liven to enjoy a heavenly existence, such that they wouldn’t need oxen to plow the fields or oil to light their lamps. Please explain to us where those heavenly days are now?

Several dozen wholers and disabled women all started shouting, saying, Mao Zhi, you should go to the cemetery and the area in front of the village, and see how many villagers have died and how many new graves there are. You should go to the mountain and the gorge, and count how many baskets there are into which people have thrown their dead children. They asked, Is this the heavenly existence you spoke of? Is this the heaven you promised us once we joined the commune? One after another, the blind, deaf, and crippled villagers complained angrily, like a torrential downpour. The deaf-mutes pointed at Mao Zhi and signed angrily.