Life and Death are Wearing Me Out (16 page)

The distance from the iron mine at Reclining Ox Mountain to Ximen Village in Northeast Gaomi Township was about twenty miles. If all four of my legs were in good shape, that little distance would not have been worth mentioning. But now one of them was useless, making the going unbelievably hard; I left traces of flesh and blood along the way, marked by wrenching painful cries from my throat. The pain made my skin twitch like ripples on a pond.

My stump was beginning to stink by the time we reached Northeast Gaomi Township, drawing hordes of flies whose buzzing filled our ears. My master broke some branches from a tree and twisted them together to make a switch to keep the flies away. My tail hung limply, too weak to swish; thanks to an attack of diarrhea, the rear half of my body was covered with filth. Each swing of my master’s switch killed many flies, but even greater numbers swarmed up to take their place. So he took off his pants and tore them into strips to replace the first bindings. Now he was wearing only shorts and a pair of heavy, thick-soled leather boots. He was a strange and comical apparition.

Along the way we dined on the wind and slept in the dew. I ate some dry grass, he subsisted on some half-rotten yams from a nearby field. Shunning roads, we walked down narrow paths to avoid encountering people, like wounded soldiers deserting the scene of battle. We entered Huangpu Village on a day when the village dining hall was open, the delightful smells wafting our way. I heard my master’s stomach rumble. He looked at me with tears in his reddened eyes, which he dried with his dirty hands.

“Goddamn it, Blackie,” he blurted out, “what are we doing? Why are we hiding from everyone? We’ve done nothing to be ashamed of. You were injured while working for the people, so the people owe you, and by taking care of you like this, I’m doing the people’s work too! Come on, we’re going in.”

Like a man leading an army of flies, he walked with me into the open-air dining hall. Steamers heaping with lamb dumplings were brought out of the kitchen and placed on a table. They were gone almost immediately. Lucky diners skewed the hot dumplings with thin tree branches and gnawed at them from the side; others tossed them from hand to hand, slurping hungrily.

Everyone saw us come in, cutting a sorry figure, ugly and filthy, and smelling as bad as we looked. Tired and hungry, we gave them a terrific fright, and probably disgusted them in the bargain, costing them their appetite. My master swatted my rump with his switch, sending a cloud of flies into the air, where they regrouped and landed on all those steaming dumplings and on the dining hall kitchen utensils. The diners hooted unappreciatively.

A fat woman in white work clothes, by all appearances the person in charge, waddled up to us, held her nose, and, in a low, muffled voice, said:

“What do you think you’re doing? Go on, get out of here!”

Someone in the crowd recognized my master.

“Aren’t you Lan Lian, from Ximen Village? Is it really you? What happened to you?”

My master just looked at the man without replying, then led me out into the yard, where everyone stayed as far away from us as possible.

“That’s Gaomi County’s one and only independent farmer,” the man shouted after us. “They know about him all the way to Changwei Prefecture! That donkey of his is almost supernatural. It killed a pair of wolves and has bitten a dozen or more people. What happened to its leg?”

The fat woman ran up.

“We don’t serve independent farmers, so get out of here!”

My master stopped walking and, in a voice filled both with dejection and passion, replied:

“You fat sow, I am an independent farmer, and I’d rather die than be served by the likes of you. But this donkey of mine is the county chief’s personal mount. He was carrying the chief down the mountain when his hoof got caught in some rocks and broke off. That’s a work-related injury, and you have an obligation to serve him.”

I’d never heard my master berate anyone so passionately before. His birthmark was nearly black. By then he was so skeletal he looked like a plucked rooster, and a very smelly one, as he advanced on the fat woman, who kept backing up until, covering her face with her hands, she burst into tears and bolted.

A man in a well-worn uniform, hair parted in the middle, looking very much like a local official, walked up to us, picking his teeth.

“What do you want?”

“I want you to feed my donkey, I want you to heat a tub of water and give him a bath, and I want you to get a doctor over here to bandage his injured leg.”

The official shouted in the direction of the kitchen, drawing a dozen people out into the yard.

“Do as he says, and make it quick.”

So they washed me from head to tail with hot water, and they summoned a doctor, who treated my injured leg with iodine, put a medicinal salve on the stump, and wrapped it with heavy gauze. Finally, they brought me some barley and alfalfa.

While I was eating, someone carried out a bowl of steaming dumplings and placed it in front of my master. A man who looked like a mess cook said softly:

“Eat up, elder brother, don’t be stubborn. Eat what you have here and don’t give a thought to your next meal. Get through today without worrying about tomorrow. In these fucked-up times you suffer for a few days, then you die, the lamp goes out. What’s that, you don’t want these?”

My master was sitting on a couple of chipped bricks tied together, bent over like a hunchback and staring at my useless stump; I don’t think he heard a word the mess cook said. His stomach was rumbling again, and I could guess how tempting those plump, white dumplings must have been. Several times he stuck out a black, grimy hand to pick one of them up, only to quickly pull it back.

My stump healed and I was out of danger, but I’d lost the ability to work and was just a crippled donkey. The slaughterhouse team came by several times with an offer to buy me and improve the lives of Party cadres with my meat. My master sent them away with loud curses.

In a story called “The Black Donkey,” Mo Yan wrote:

In the spring, the earth takes on the quality of leavened dough; in addition to the wheels of our heavily laden cart, my hooves also sank deeply into the ground, making it almost impossible to keep moving. The fertilizer had to be taken out into the fields, so hard work was called for; I pulled with all my might to make the job easier on him. But I hadn’t gone more than a dozen steps when I left the shoe my mistress had made stuck in the dirt. When the exposed stump hit the ground like a club, the terrible pain pushed my sweat glands to the limit.
Hee-haw, hee-haw
— It’s killing me! I’m worse than useless, Master. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the blue side of his face and his bulging eyes, and I was determined to help him pull the cart into the field, even if I had to crawl, in part to repay his kindness, in part as payback for all the smug looks, and in part to create a model for all those little bastards. Owing to the loss of balance, I had to bend over until my knee touched the ground. Ah, that hurt a lot less than touching it with the stump and made it easier to pull. So I went down on both knees, in full kneel, and, pulling with all my might, managed to get the cart moving again. The shaft pressed so hard against my throat, I had trouble breathing. I knew how awkward I must have looked, certainly worthy of ridicule. But let them laugh, all of them, so long as I could help my master move the cart to where he wanted it to go. That would spell victory, and glory!

After he’d unloaded the fertilizer, my master came up and wrapped his arms around my head. He was sobbing so hard he could barely get the words out:

“Blackie . . . such a good donkey . . .”

After taking out his pipe and filling it, he lit up and took a deep drag. Then he held the stem up to my mouth.

“Take a puff, Blackie,” he said. “You won’t feel quite so exhausted.”

After following him for so many years, I’d gotten hooked on tobacco. I took a deep drag and blew streams of smoke out of my nostrils.

That winter, after learning that the Supply and Marketing Co-op director, Pang Hu, had been fitted with a prosthetic leg, my master decided that I deserved to be fitted with a prosthetic hoof. To that end, he and his wife, drawing on a friendship forged years before, went to see Pang Hu’s wife, Wang Leyun, and told her what they had in mind. Happy to oblige, she let my master and mistress study Pang Hu’s new leg from all angles. It had been made in a factory dedicated to producing prosthetics for crippled heroes of the revolution, a service obviously denied to me, a donkey. Even if the factory had been willing to undertake the task, my master would not have been able to afford the cost. So they decided to make a prosthetic hoof on their own. Three whole months it took them, through trial and error, until they finally managed to produce a false hoof that looked pretty much like the real thing. All that remained was to strap it on.

They walked me around the yard; the new hoof felt much better than the beat-up shoe, and while my gait was somewhat stiff, my limp was less pronounced. So my master led me out onto the street, head high, chest out, as if proudly showing off. I tried my best to match his attitude and give him the face he deserved. Village children fell in behind us to share in the excitement. Seeing the looks on people’s faces and listening to what they were saying, I could tell that they held him in high regard. Then when we met up with gaunt, sallow Hong Taiyue, he remarked:

“Lan Lian, are you putting on a show for the People’s Commune?”

“I wouldn’t dare,” my master replied. “The People’s Commune and I are like well water and river water — they don’t mix.”

“Yes, but you’re walking on a People’s Commune street.” Hong pointed first to the street, then to the skies above. “And you’re breathing the air above the People’s Commune and soaking up rays of the sun shining down on the People’s Commune.”

“This street was here before the People’s Commune was created, and so were the air and the sun. They were given to all people and animals by the powers of heaven, and you and your People’s Commune have no right to monopolize them!” He breathed in deeply, stomped his foot on the ground, and raised his face to the sun. “Wonderful air, terrific sunlight!” Then he patted me on the shoulder and said, “Blackie, take a deep breath, stomp down on the ground, and let the sun’s rays warm you.”

“You talk like that now, Lan Lian, but you’ll soften up one day,” Hong said.

“Old Hong, roll up the street, blot out the sun, and stuff up my nose if you can.”

“Just you wait,” Hong said indignantly. I’d intended to put my new hoof to use by working several more years for my master. But then the famine came, turning the people into wild animals, cruel and unfeeling. After eating all the bark from trees and the edible grass, a gang of them charged into the Ximen estate compound like a pack of starving wolves. My master tried to protect me by threatening them with a club, but he lost his nerve under the menacing green light that blazed in their eyes. He threw down his club and ran away. I trembled in fear in the presence of that gang, knowing my day of reckoning had come, that my life as a donkey had come full circle. All that had happened over the ten years since I’d been reborn on this spot on earth flashed before me. I closed my eyes and waited.

“Take it!” I heard someone in the yard yell. “Take the independent farmer’s grain stores! Kill! Kill the independent farmer’s crippled donkey!”

I heard sorrowful shouts from my mistress and the children and the sounds of pillaging and fighting among the starving people. A heavy blow on the head stunned me and drove my soul right out of my body to hover in the air above and watch the people cut and slice the carcass of a donkey into pieces of meat.

“Unless I’m mistaken,” I ventured under the wild, piercing gaze of the big-headed child, Lan Qiansui, “you were a donkey that was hit over the head by a starving villager. You crashed to the ground, where your body was cut up and eaten by a gang of starving villagers. I witnessed it with my own eyes. My guess is, your spirit hovered about the scene in the Ximen estate compound for a while before heading back to the underworld, where, after many twists and turns, you were born into the world once more, this time as an ox.”

“Exactly right.” I detected a slightly melancholy tone in his voice. “By describing for you my life as a donkey, I have related about half of what happened later. During my years as an ox, I stuck to you like a shadow, and you are well versed in the things that happened to me, so there’s no point in my repeating them, is there?”

I studied his head, which was so much larger than either his age or his body seemed to warrant; studied his enormous mouth, with which he talked on and on; studied all his myriad expressions, appearing one minute and vanishing the next — a donkey’s natural, unrestrained dissipation, an ox’s innocence and strength, a pig’s gluttony and violence, a dog’s loyalty and fawning nature, a monkey’s alertness and mischievous qualities — and studied the world-weary and disconsolate composite expression, which incorporated all of the above. My memories involving the ox came thick and fast, like waves crashing on the shore; or moths drawn to a flame; or iron filings sucked toward a magnet; or odors surging toward your nostrils; or colors seeping outward on fine paper; or my longing for that woman born with the world’s loveliest face, interminable, eternally present. . .