Life and Death are Wearing Me Out (41 page)

“Old Diao, I tell you the truth, there’s no real difference between what you and I got. . . . You’re being childish, assuming that somebody else’s cake is bigger than yours.”

“How fucking stupid do you think I am?” he said angrily “My eyes might fall for that, but not my nose! Hell, my eyes won’t fall for that either.” He bent down, scooped some feed out of his trough, and flung it down in front of mine. Anyone could see the difference. “Look at that and tell me what you’re eating and then what I’m eating. Shit, we’re both boars, so how come we get different treatment? You’re going to ‘serve the revolution by mating,’ well, am I serving the counterrevolution then? If people divide themselves into revolutionary and counterrevolutionary, does that mean there are classes of pigs too? It’s all because of favoritism and crazy thoughts. I saw the way Bai Xing’er was looking at you. That was the look a woman gives her husband! Maybe she wants to mate with you, what do you think? If you do, then next spring, she’ll have a litter of piglets with human heads, or monsters with pig heads. Won’t they be beautiful?” he said hatefully, then flashed an evil grin, showing that his slanderous outburst had driven the gloom from his mind.

I scooped up the clump of feed he’d tossed over and flung it far over the wall. “I was seriously considering doing you a favor,” I said contemptuously, “but after what you just said, sorry, brother Diao, but I’ll dump the rest of the food on a pile of shit before I’ll give it to you.” I reached down, scooped up what was left in my trough, and tossed it on the ground, where I relieved myself. Then I went back and lay down on my straw bed. “If you’re still hungry, sir,” I said, “be my guest.”

Diao Xiaosan’s eyes flashed green; his teeth ground noisily. “Pig Sixteen,” he said, “the old saying goes, ‘You don’t know your legs are muddy till you step out of the water.’ The river flows east for thirty years and west for thirty years! The sun’s rays are on the move. They won’t always shine down on your nest!” Now that he’d had his say, his hideous face disappeared from view. But I could hear him pacing anxiously on the other side of the wall and, from time to time, banging his head against the gate or scraping the wall with his hooves. That went on for a while until I heard a strange noise from his side. It took a number of guesses before I figured out that he had stood up on his hind legs and, partly for warmth and partly to vent his spleen, had begun tearing sorghum stalks out of the canopy over his pen. Unfortunately, some came from my side.

I rose up on my hind legs and stuck my head over the wall. “Stop that,” I protested.

With a stalk of sorghum clenched between his teeth, he tugged and tugged until he brought it down, then chewed it into pieces. “Shit,” he said, “who gives a damn! If I’m going to die, then I’m taking others with me! The ways of the world aren’t fair, so the little demons will tear down the temple.” He rose up on his hind legs, a sorghum stalk in his mouth, and came down as hard as he could, the concussion sending one of the red tiles crashing to the ground and opening a hole in the canopy, through which snow fell in on his head. With a shake of that big head, the green lights in his eyes crashed into the wall and shattered like glass. Obviously, the guy was nuts. I nervously looked up at the canopy above me and started pacing, on the verge of jumping over the wall to stop that nonsense. But taking on a madman only ensures that both sides will suffer, and in my anxiety I let out a shriek that sounded like an air-raid warning. I’ve tried to imitate the revolutionary style of singing, pinching my vocal cords, but it never worked. Now, in my high state of anxiety, my howl was actually closer to an air-raid warning than anything. That came as a memory of my youth, when there were countywide air-raid drills to put us on guard against attacks by imperialists, reactionaries, and counterrevolutionaries. In every village and hamlet in the county, loudspeakers first blared a low, rumbling sound. That’s what enemy bombers sound like, a baby’s voice announced. That was followed by an ear-splitting shriek. That’s what enemy planes sound like when they come in for strafing attacks. . . . Finally, demonic howls emerged. All county revolutionary cadres and all poor and lower-middle peasants, listen carefully to the differences. These are international air-raid warnings, and when you hear one of them, drop what you’re doing and take refuge in an air-raid shelter. If there isn’t one nearby, cover your head with both arms and hunker down.... I was like a student of opera who finally finds his voice and is overjoyed. I paced the confines of my pen and howled, and in order to send my warning as far as possible, I shot up an apricot tree. Snow on the branches, like flour or cotton wadding, fell to the ground, drizzling here and fluttering there, spongy in some places and heavy in others, and everywhere purple twigs peeked out from the white snow, glossy and brittle, like legendary ocean coral. From one limb to the next I climbed all the way to the top of the tree, where I could see not only all of Apricot Garden Pig Farm, but the whole village. I saw chimney smoke lazing into the sky, I saw thousands of trees whose canopies were like giant steamed buns, and I saw crowds of people running out of buildings that seemed about to collapse from the weight of rooftop snow. The snow was white, the people black. Traveling through knee-high drifts was closer to staggering than walking. It was my air-raid alert that had brought them out of their houses, and the first to emerge — from their heated five-room compound — were Jinlong and Jiefang. They walked around a bit and then looked into the sky — I knew they were searching for imperialist, revisionist, or counterrevolutionary bombers — and finally fell to the ground, where they wrapped their arms around their heads, as a flock of loudly cawing crows flew right over them. The birds had built their nests in a grove of trees east of the Grain Barge River, but with so much snow on the ground, finding food was especially hard, so they came every day to the Apricot Garden Pig Farm to forage. After a while Jinlong and Jiefang stood up and looked into the sky — which had cleared up after the snowstorm — again; following that, they looked down and eventually discovered the source of the air-raid warning.

Lan Jiefang, now I have to talk about you. You raised your bamboo whip and charged me bravely, although you slipped and fell twice because of the ice-covered bits of pig food on the path through the trees: once you fell forward and sprawled on the ground like a dog fighting over shit; the other time you fell backward and landed like a turtle sunning its underbelly. The gentle sun’s rays and the snowy landscape made for a beautiful setting; the crows’ wings seemed gilded. The blue half of your face glowed. You were never considered one of the major personalities in Ximen Village; in fact, except for Mo Yan, who you often chewed the fat with, just about everybody ignored you; even me, a pig at the time, never gave you much thought, even though you were a so-called feed boss. But at this moment, with that whip trailing you as you came at me, I discovered to my surprise that you’d grown into a slender young man. Sometime later I counted on my hooves and discovered that you were already twenty-two. Yes, you’d grown up.

With my arms wrapped around a limb and sunbeams filtering through the red clouds, I opened my mouth and released a swirling air-raid alert. People who had gathered at the base of the tree were steaming, the embarrassed looks on their faces somewhere between laughter and crying. An old man named Wang intoned sadly:

“A demon emerges, the nation submerges!”

But Jinlong cut him off:

“Watch your tongue, Gramps Wang!”

Knowing he’d said something he shouldn’t have, Gramps Wang slapped himself. “Who told you to rant like that?” he cursed himself. “Secretary Lan, a great man overlooks a small man’s mistakes. Forgive this old man’s crime!”

At the time Jinlong was a newly minted member of the Party and was already a member of the Branch Party Committee, as well as Party secretary of the Ximen Village Communist Youth League. He was more than proud, he was haughty. With a wave of his hand to the old man, he said:

“I know you’ve read heretical books like
Warring Kingdoms
and that they’ve found their way into your heart, so you like to show off. If not for that, that one sentence alone would be enough to label you a counterrevolutionary.”

Jinlong’s comment had a chilling effect on the atmosphere, and that gave him the opportunity to deliver a sermon; he remarked that inclement weather presents an opportunity for imperialists, revisionists, and counterrevolutionaries to attack; it also creates ideal conditions for hidden class enemies in the village to carry out sabotage. He then turned his attention to me, declaring me to be an enlightened pig. “He may be a pig, but he’s achieved a higher degree of awareness than many people.”

Dizzy with pride, I forgot why I was sounding air-raid warnings in the first place. Like a pop singer responding to an admiring audience with a rousing encore, I cleared my throat for another burst of sound, but before it left my throat, I saw Lan Jiefang twirl his whip at the base of the tree, and before I saw it coming, the tip flicked against my ear. Boy, did that hurt! But the worst thing was, my head suddenly felt heavier than the rest of my body, and I fell out of the tree into the snow.

When I managed to get to my feet, I saw blood on the snow — my blood. The whip had opened up an inch-long gash in my right ear, one that would accompany me through the second, and most glorious, half of my life. It was also the reason I bore a grudge against you from then on, though I later understood why you resorted to such cruelty. I forgave you in theory, but could never quite let it go emotionally.

Although I was on the receiving end of a whip that day and scarred for life, my neighbor Diao Xiaosan suffered a much crueler fate. There was a certain charm to my climbing a tree and sounding air-raid alerts, but there was no redeeming feature in his foul-mouthed attacks on society and the destruction of property. Some people criticized Lan Jiefang for using his whip on me, but when he whipped Diao Xiaosan bloody, he was universally praised. Shouts of “Beat him, beat the bastard to death!” were on everyone’s lips. At first, Diao hopped around so violently he broke two steel rods in the gate to his pen. But his strength gradually gave out, and people rushed in, grabbed his hind legs, and dragged him out into the snow. Jiefang’s hatred hadn’t abated; he stood with his legs bent like wickets, each snap of his whip opening a new gash on Diao’s body. His gaunt blue face was twitching; knots protruded on his cheeks from clenching his teeth. “You scumbag, you whore!” he shouted with each lashing of his whip, switching back and forth as each hand tired. That, of course, was no mean feat. At first, Diao Xiaosan rolled around on the ground, but after a few dozen lashes, he laid out flat, like a hunk of dead meat. Jiefang still wasn’t satisfied. Everyone knew he was taking out his frustrations on the pig, but no one tried to stop him, even though they could see that the pig might well not survive the beating. Finally Jinlong stepped up and grabbed Jiefang’s arm. “Enough,” he said coldly. Diao Xiaosan’s blood stained the snowy ground. My blood was red, his was black. Mine was sacred, his was foul. In order to punish him for his wrongs, the people pierced his nose and put in a pair of rings. They also chained his front legs. In the days that followed, that chain rattled as he paced his pen, and every time the famous aria by Li Yuhe from the model revolutionary opera
The Red Lantern
—“These chains may shackle my hands and feet, but they cannot keep my aspirations and ideals from soaring into the heavens!”—blasted from the loudspeaker, for some reason I felt a tinge of respect for this mortal enemy, almost as if he’d become a hero, and I was the one who had sold him out.

Yes, as Mo Yan wrote in his story “Revenge,” the Apricot Garden Pig Farm entered a period of crisis as the Lunar New Year approached. The pig food had all been eaten, so had the piles of rotten beans and leaves. There was nothing left but moldy cottonseed mixed with snow Desperate times. A time, as it turned out, when Hong Taiyue fell gravely ill; his heavy responsibilities now rested on the shoulders of Jinlong, just when he was experiencing emotional torment. The person he loved ought to have been Huang Huzhu, a relationship that began when she repaired a uniform for him. Their bonds had early on been consummated, when Huang Hezuo made her move, and they sported among the clouds and rain. As they all grew older, the Huang twins both clamored to marry Jinlong. Who knew these secrets? In addition to me, a pig that pretty much knew everything, only Lan Jiefang. I remained above it all, but you, whose love for Huang Huzhu was not reciprocated, were tormented and horribly jealous. That was one of the reasons you knocked me out of my tree with your whip and why you dealt so cruelly with Diao Xiaosan. Now that we can look back, don’t you think the feelings that tormented you at the time were pretty insignificant compared to what happened later? Besides, the world is unpredictable, and conjugal bliss is dictated by heaven. The person you are to marry has already been determined. Isn’t that so, since Huang Huzhu eventually shared your bed?

During that winter, pigs that had frozen to death were dragged out of their pens every day, and every night I was awakened by the wails of grief-stricken Yimeng pigs whose pen-mates had died from the cold. Every morning I looked out through the metal slats of my gate and saw Lan Jiefang or somebody else dragging a pig carcass in the direction of the five-room building. The dead animals were skin and bones, their legs stiff as boards. Hot-tempered Howling Wolf died, so did the slutty Rape Flower. At first they died at the rate of three or four a day, but by the latter days of the twelfth month, as many as six or seven were dying each day. On the twenty-third of that month, sixteen dead pigs were dragged out of their pens. I did a quick calculation and came up with the figure of more than two hundred pigs that had departed for the Western Heaven by the end of the year. I had no way of knowing if their souls had gone down to hell or up to heaven, but their earthly remains were piled up in dark corners at the rear of the building, where they were cooked and eaten by Ximen Jinlong and the other humans. That is a memory that sticks with me even now.