Life and Death are Wearing Me Out (3 page)

There was so much snow that the buildings, trees, and streets were buried, nothing but white. All the dogs were hiding, so there’d be no dung that day. But I went out anyway. The air was fresh and clean, the wind was yet mild, and at that early hour there were all sorts of strange and mysterious rarities — the only way you could see them was to get up early. I walked from Front Street to Back Street and took a turn around the fortified village wall in time to see the horizon change from red to white, a fiery sunrise as the red sun rose into the sky and turned the vast snowy landscape bright red, just like the legendary Crystal Realm. I found the child in front of the God of War Temple, half buried in the snow. At first I thought he was dead and figured I’d pay for a meager coffin to bury him to keep the wild dogs away. Only a year before, a naked man had frozen to death in front of the Earth God Temple. He was red from head to toe, his pecker sticking out straight as a spear, which drew peals of laughter. That outlandish friend of yours, Mo Yan, wrote about that in his story “The Man Died, His Dick Lived On.” Thanks to my generosity, the corpse of this man, the one who died by the roadside but whose dick lived on, was buried in the old graveyard west of town. Good deeds like that have wide-ranging influence and are more consequential than memorials or biographies. I set down my dung basket and nudged the boy, then felt his chest. It was still warm, so I knew he was alive. I took off my lined coat and wrapped him in it, then picked him up and carried him home. Prismlike rays of the morning sun lit up the sky and the ground ahead of me; people were outside shoveling snow, so many villagers were witness to the charity of Ximen Nao. For that alone, you people should not have shot me with your musket. And on that point, Lord Yama, you should not have sent me back as a donkey! Everyone says that saving a life is better than building a seven-story pagoda, and I, Ximen Nao, sure as hell saved a life. Me, Ximen Nao, and not just one life. During the famine one spring I sold twenty bushels of sorghum at a low price and exempted my tenant farmers from paying rent. That kept many people alive. And look at my miserable fate. Is there no justice in heaven or on earth, in the world of men or the realm of spirits? Any sense of conscience? I protest. I am mystified!

I took the youngster home and laid him down on a warm bed in the bunkhouse. I was about to light a fire to warm him when the foreman, Old Zhang, said, You can’t do that, Boss. A frozen turnip must thaw out slowly. If you heat it, it will turn to mush. That made sense, so I let the boy warm up naturally on the bed and had someone in the house heat a bowl of sweet ginger water, which I poured slowly into his mouth after prying it open with chopsticks. He began to moan once some of that ginger water was in his stomach. Having brought him back from the dead, I told Old Zhang to shave off the boy’s ratty hair and the fleas living in it. We gave him a bath and got him into some clean clothes. Then I took him to see my aging mother. He was a clever little one. As soon as he saw her, he fell to his knees and cried out, “Granny,” which thrilled my mother, who chanted “Amita Buddha” and asked which temple the little monk came from. She asked him his age. He shook his head and said he didn’t know. Where was home? He wasn’t sure. When he was asked about his family, he shook his head like one of those stick-and-ball toys. So I let him stay. He was a smart little pole-shinnying monkey. He called me Foster Dad as soon as he laid eyes on me, and called Madame Bai Foster Mother. But foster son or not, I expected him to work, since even I engaged in manual labor, and I was the landlord. You work or you don’t eat. Just a new way of expressing an idea that has been around for a long time. The boy had no name, but since he had a blue birthmark on the left side of his face, I told him I’d call him Lan Lian, or Blue Face, with Lan being his surname. But, he said, I want to have the same name as you, Foster Dad, so won’t you call me Ximen Lanlian? I said no, that the name Ximen was not available to just anyone, but that if he worked hard for twenty years, we’d see about it. He started out by helping the foreman tend the horse and donkey — Ah, Lord Yama, how could you be so evil as to turn me into a donkey?— and gradually moved on to bigger jobs. Don’t be fooled by his thin frame and frail appearance; he worked with great efficiency and possessed good judgment and a considerable bag of tricks, all of which made up for his lack of strength. Now, seeing his broad shoulders and muscular arms, I could tell he’d grown into a man to be reckoned with. “Ha ha, the foal is out!” he shouted as he bent down, reached out his large hands, and helped me stand, causing me more shame and anger than I care to think about.

“I am not a donkey!” I roared. “I am a man! I am Ximen Nao!” But my throat felt exactly the way it had when the two blue-faced demons had throttled me. I couldn’t speak no matter how hard I tried. Despair, terror, rage. I spat out slobber, sticky tears oozed from my eyes. His hand slipped, and I thudded to the ground, right in the middle of all that gooey amniotic fluid and afterbirth, which had the consistency of jellyfish.

“Bring me a towel, and hurry!” Lan Lian shouted. A pregnant woman came out of the house, and my attention was immediately caught by the freckles on her slightly puffy face, and her big, round, sorrowful eyes.
Hee-haw, hee-haw
— She’s mine, she’s Ximen Nao’s woman, my first concubine, Yingchun, brought into the family as a maidservant by my wife. Since we didn’t know her family name, she took the name of my wife, Bai. In the spring of 1946, she became my concubine. With big eyes and a straight nose, a broad forehead, wide mouth, and square jaw, hers was a face of good fortune. Even more important, her full breasts, with their pert nipples, and a broad pelvis made her a cinch to bear children. My wife, apparently barren, sent Yingchun to my bed with a comment that was easy to understand and filled with heartfelt sincerity. She said, “Lord of the Manor [that’s what she called me], I want you to accept her. Good water must not irrigate other people’s fields.”

She was a fertile field indeed. She got pregnant our first night together. And not just pregnant, but with twins. The following spring she gave birth to a boy and a girl, what they call a dragon and phoenix birth. So we named the boy Ximen Jinlong, or Golden Dragon, and the girl Ximen Baofeng, Precious Phoenix. The midwife said she’d never seen a woman better suited to having babies, with her broad pelvis and resilient birth canal. The babies popped out into her hands, like melons dumped from a burlap sack. Most women cry out in anguish the first time, but my Yingchun had her babies without making a sound. According to the midwife, she wore a mysterious smile from start to finish, as if having a baby was a form of entertainment. That gave the poor midwife a case of the nerves; she was afraid that monsters might come shooting out.

The birth of Jinlong and Baofeng produced great joy in the Ximen household. But so as not to frighten the babies or their mother, I had the foreman, Old Zhang, and his helper, Lan Lian, buy ten strings of firecrackers, eight hundred in all, hang them on a wall on the southern edge of the village, and light them there. The sound of all those tiny explosions made me so happy I nearly fainted. I have a quirky habit of dealing with good news by doing hard work; it’s an itch I can’t explain. So while the firecrackers were still popping, I rolled up my sleeves, jumped into the livestock pen, and shoveled up ten wagonloads of dung that had accumulated through the winter. Ma Zhibo, a feng shui master who was given to putting on mystical airs, came running up to the pen and said to me mystifyingly, Menshi — that’s my style name — my fine young man, with a woman in childbirth in the house, you must not work on fences or dig up dirt, and absolutely must not shovel dung or dredge a well. Stirring up the Wandering God does not bode well for the newborn.

Ma Zhibo’s comment nearly made my heart stop, but you can’t call an arrow back once it’s been fired, and any job worth starting is certainly worth finishing. I couldn’t stop then, because only half the pen was done. There’s an old saying: A man has ten years of good fortune when he need fear neither god nor ghost. I was an upright man, not afraid of demons. So what if I, Ximen Nao, bumped up against the Wandering God? It was, after all, only Ma Zhibo’s foul comment, so I scooped a peculiar gourd-shaped object out of the dung. It had the appearance of congealed rubber or frozen meat, was murky but nearly transparent, brittle but pliable. I dumped it on the ground at the edge of the pen to examine it more closely It couldn’t be the legendary Wandering God, could it? I watched Ma’s face turn ashen and his goatee begin to quiver. With his hands cupped in front of his chest as a sign of respect, he said a prayer and backed up. When he bumped into the wall, he bolted. With a sneer, I said, If this is the Wandering God, it’s nothing to fear. Wandering God, Wandering God, if I say your name three times and you’re still here, don’t blame me if I treat you harshly. Wandering God, Wandering God, Wandering God! With my eyes tightly shut, I shouted the name three times. When I opened them, it was still there, hadn’t changed, just a lump of something in the pen next to some horse shit. Whatever it was, it was dead, so I raised my hoe and chopped it in two. The inside was just like the outside, sort of rubbery or maybe frozen, not unlike the sap that oozes out of peach tree knots. I scooped it up and flung it over the wall, where it could lie with the horse shit and donkey urine, hoping that it might be good as fertilizer, so the early summer corn would grow in ears like ivory and the late summer wheat would have tassels as long as dog tails.

That Mo Yan, in a story he called “Wandering God,” he wrote:

What an imagination!

The firecrackers put an end to rumors that Ximen Nao was sterile. People began preparing congratulatory gifts they would bring to me in nine days. But the old rumor had no sooner been cast aside than a new one was born. Overnight, word that Ximen Nao had stirred up the Wandering God while shoveling dung in his pen spread through all the eighteen villages and towns of Northeast Gaomi Township. And not just spread, but picked up embellishments along the way. The Wandering God, it was said, was a big meaty egg with all seven of the facial orifices; it rolled around in the animal pen until I chopped it in two and a bright light shot into the sky. Stirring up the Wandering God was sure to cause a bloody calamity within a hundred days. I was well aware that the tall tree catches the wind and that wealth always causes envy. Many people could not wait for Ximen Nao to fall, and fall hard. I was troubled, but could not lose faith. If the gods wanted to punish me, why send the lovely Jinlong and Baofeng my way?

Yingchun beamed when she saw me; with difficulty she bent down, and at that moment I saw the baby she was carrying. It was a boy with a blue birthmark on his left cheek, so there was no doubt he’d come from Lan Lian’s seed. How humiliating! A flame like the tongue of a poisonous viper snaked up in my heart. I had murderous urges, at minimum needed to curse someone. I could have chopped Lan Lian into pieces. Lan Lian, you’re an ungrateful bastard, an unconscionable son of a bitch! You started out by calling me Foster Dad and eventually dropped the word
foster.
Well, if I’m your dad, then Yingchun, my concubine, is your stepmother, yet you’ve taken her as a wife and have had her carry your child. You’ve corrupted the system of human relations and deserve to be struck down by the God of Thunder! Then, when you arrive in hell, you deserve to have your skin flayed, be stuffed with grass, and be dried before you are reincarnated as a lowly animal! But heaven is bereft of justice, and hell has abandoned reason. Instead of you, it is I who have been sent back as a lowly animal, me, Ximen Nao, who lived his life doing good. And what about you, Yingchun, you little slut? How much sweet talk did you whisper while you were in my arms? And how many solemn pledges of love did you take? Yet my bones weren’t even cold before you went to bed with my hired hand. How can a slut like you have the nerve to go on living? You should do away with yourself at once. I’ll give you the white silk to do it. Damn it, no, you are not worthy of white silk! A bloody rope used on pigs, looped over a beam covered with rat shit and bat urine, to hang yourself is what’s good for you! That or four ounces of arsenic! Or a one-way trip down the well outside the village where all the wild dogs have drowned! You should be paraded up and down the street on a criminal’s rack! In the underworld you deserve to be thrown into a snake pit reserved for adulteresses! Then you should be reincarnated as a lowly animal, over and over and over, forever!
Hee-haw, hee-haw
— But no, the person reincarnated as a lowly animal was Ximen Nao, a man of honor, instead of my first concubine.

She knelt clumsily beside me and carefully wiped the sticky stuff from my body with a blue-checked chamois rag. It felt wonderful against my wet skin. She had a soft touch, as if wiping down her own baby. What a cute foal, you lovely little thing. Such a pretty face, and what big blue eyes! And those ears, covered with fuzz . . . the rag moved to each part of my body in turn. She was still as big-hearted as ever, and was covering me with love, that I could see. Deeply touched, I felt the evil heat inside me dissipate. My memory of walking the earth as a human grew distant and cloudy. I was nice and dry. I’d stopped shivering. My bones had hardened, my legs felt strong. An inner force and a sense of purpose combined to make me put that strength to good use. Ah, it’s a little male donkey. She was drying off my genitals. How humiliating! Images of our sexual congress back when I was a human flooded my mind. A little male what? The son of a mother donkey? I looked up and saw a female donkey standing nearby, quaking. Is that my mother? A donkey? Rage and uncontrollable anxiety forced me to my feet. I stood there on four feet, like a low stool on high legs.