Life and Death are Wearing Me Out (65 page)

“Tell me honestly, Dog, who’s right, him or me?” She was sitting on a kitchen stool, leaning up against the butcher block as she sharpened a rusty knife, the edge of the spatula, and a pair of scissors. Apparently, she’d decided to utilize our chat time to put a shiny edge on all the sharp objects in the house. “She’s younger than me, and prettier, but I was young and pretty once. Isn’t that right? Besides, I may not be young and good looking now, but neither is he. He never was good looking, not with that blue birthmark across half his face. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, and the sight of his face makes me shudder. Dog, if Ximen Jinlong hadn’t ruined my reputation as a girl, do you think I’d have stooped to marrying this one? Dog, my life was ruined, all thanks to those two brothers. ...” When her complaints reached this stage, tears would moisten the front of her clothes. “Now I’m an ugly old woman, while he’s a prominent official, so it’s time to get rid of the old lady, like throwing away a pair of worn socks. Does that make sense to you, Dog? Is that a sign of conscience?” She sharpened the knife with determination. “I have to stand up for myself. I’m going to hone my body till it shines like this knife.” She touched the edge of the blade to her finger. It left a white mark; sharp enough. “We’re going back to the village tomorrow, Dog, and you’re coming along. We’ll go in his car. In all these years I’ve never once sat in his car, keeping public and private separate to protect his good name. I can take credit for half of the prestige he enjoys with the public. Dog, people take advantage of good people, just like people ride good horses. But no more. Now we’re going to be like those other wives of officials, doing whatever we have to do to show people that Lan Jiefang has a wife, and that she is to be reckoned with. . . .”

The car drove across the newly built Bridge of Wealth and into Ximen Village. The squat old stone bridge stood unused nearby, except for a bunch of bare-assed boys taking turns diving into the river below and sending water splashing skyward. Your son put down his game and gazed out the window, a look of envy crossing his face.

“Kaifang,” your wife said, “your cousin Huanhuan is one of those boys.”

I tried to recall what Huanhuan and Gaige looked like. Huanhuan’s face had always been sort of gaunt, and clean, Gaige’s was pale and pudgy, and always decorated with a line of snot down to his lips. I still recalled their unique smells, and that triggered an upsurge, like a raging river, of all the thousands of odors associated with the Ximen Village of eight years before.

“Wow, standing there naked at his age,” he muttered. I couldn’t tell if that was a scornful or an envious comment.

“Don’t forget, when we get home, say sweet things, be polite,” your wife reminded him. “We want your grandparents to be happy and our relatives to admire you.”

“Then smear some honey on my lips!”

“You love to upset me, don’t you?” your wife said. “But those jars of honey are for your grandparents. Say you bought them.”

“Where was I supposed to have gotten the money?” he said with a pout. “They won’t believe me.”

By now the car was driving down the village’s main street, lined with rows of 1980s barracks-style houses, all with the word
Demolish
on the brick walls. A pair of cranes with their enormous orange arms stood ready to begin rebuilding Ximen Village.

The car pulled up to the gate of the old-fashioned Ximen family compound. The driver honked the horn, bringing a swarm of people out of the yard. I detected their individual odors at the same time that I saw their faces. Signs of age appeared in both their odors and their looks. All the faces were older, looser, and furrowed: Lan Lian’s blue face, Yingchun’s swarthy face, Huang Tong’s yellow face, Qiuxiang’s pale face, and Huzhu’s red face.

Your wife wouldn’t step out of the car until your driver opened the door for her. Then she scooped up the hem of her dress, climbed out, and, because she wasn’t used to wearing heels, nearly fell. I watched as she struggled to keep her balance and not call attention to her gimpy hip.

“Ah, my darling daughter!” Qiuxiang cried out happily as she ran up to Hezuo and seemed about to throw her arms around her. She didn’t, stopping just before she reached her daughter. The once willowy woman whose cheeks were now slack, her belly quite pronounced, had a loving and fawning look in her eyes as she reached out to touch the sequins on your wife’s dress. “My goodness,” she said in a tone that suited her perfectly, “can this really be my own daughter? I thought for a moment a fairy had come down from the heavens!”

Your mother, Yingchun, walked up, aided by a cane, since one side of her body was not functioning. She raised her arm weakly and said to your wife:

“Where’s my darling grandson, Kaifang?”

Your driver opened the other door to bring out the gifts. I jumped out.

“Is that Puppy Four?” Yingchun gasped. “My heavens, he’s big as an ox!”

Your son emerged, I think, reluctantly.

“Kaifang,” Yingchun cried out. “Let Grandma look at you. You’re a head taller, and it’s only been a few months.”

“Hi, Grandma,” he said. Then he said, “Hi, Grandpa,” to your father, who had come up and patted him on the head. Two faces with blue birthmarks, one coarse and old, the other fresh and supple, presented an interesting contrast. Your son said hello to all his grandparents. Then your father turned to your wife. “Where’s his father? Why didn’t he come with you?”

“He’s at a conference in the provincial capital,” she replied.

“Gome inside,” your mother said, thumping the ground with her cane, “come inside, all of you.” She spoke with the authority of the head of the household.

Your wife said to your driver, “You can go back now, but be here at three to pick us up. Don’t be late.”

The people swept your wife and son into the yard, all carrying colorful packages in their arms. You assume I was left out of all the merriment, right? Well, you’re wrong. While the people were enjoying themselves, a black-and-white dog came out of the house. The smell of a sibling filled my nostrils, a surge of memories filled my mind. “Dog One! Elder brother!” I greeted him excitedly. “Dog Four, little brother!” he replied, as excited as I was. Our loud vocalizations startled Yingchun, who turned to look at us.

“You two brothers, how many years has it been? Let’s see . . .” She counted on her fingers. “One, two, three years . . . my goodness, it’s been eight years. For a dog that’s half a lifetime!”

We touched noses and licked each other’s face. We were very happy.

Just then my second brother came toward me from the west, along with his mistress, Baofeng. A skinny boy was right behind Baofeng, and the smell told me it was Gaige. I was amazed by how tall he’d gotten.

“Number Two, look who’s here!” Our elder brother cried out. “Dog Two!” I shouted as I ran over to greet him. He was a black dog who’d gotten our father’s genes. We looked a lot alike, but I was much bigger. We three brothers kept nudging and rubbing up against one another, happy to be together again after so long. After a while they asked me about our sister, and I told them she was doing well, that she’d had a litter of three pups, all of whom had been sold, earning a lot of money for her family. But when I asked after our mother, I was met by gloomy looks. With tears in their eyes they told me she’d died, though no one knew she was sick. Fortunately, Lan Lian had made a coffin and buried her in that plot of land that meant so much to him. For a dog it was a fine tribute.

While we three brothers were getting the most out of our reunion, Baofeng looked over at us and seemed shocked when she saw me. “Is that really Dog Four? How’d you get so big? You were the runt of the litter.”

I looked her over while she was looking me over. After three reincarnations, Ximen Nao’s memories still hung on, although buried under a host of incidents over a period of many years.

On a page of history in the distant past, I was her father, she was my daughter. But now I was just a dog, whereas she was my dog-brother’s mistress and the half sister of my master. She had little color in her face, and her hair, though it hadn’t turned gray, looked dry and brittle, like grass growing atop a wall after a frost. She was dressed all in black, except for patches of white on her cloth slippers. She was mourning the loss of her husband, Ma Liangcai. The gloomy smell of death clung to her. But, thinking back, she’d always had a gloomy, melancholy smell. She seldom smiled, and when she did, it was like reflected light on snow — dreary and cold, a look that was hard to forget. The boy behind her, Ma Gaige, was as skinny as his father. A onetime pudgy-faced little boy had grown into a gaunt teenager with ears that stuck out prominently; surprisingly, he had several gray hairs. He was wearing blue shorts, a short-sleeved white shirt — the Ximen Elementary School uniform — and a pair of white sneakers. He was carrying a plastic bowl filled with cherries in both hands.

As for me, I followed my two dog brothers in a look around Ximen Village. I’d left home as a puppy and had virtually no impressions of the place outside of the Ximen family home, but this was the village where I was born; in the words of Mo Yan in one of his essays, “hometowns are tied to a person by blood.” So as we strolled down the streets and scoped out the village in general, I was deeply moved. I saw some familiar faces and detected many unfamiliar smells. There were also a lot of familiar smells that were somehow absent — no trace at all of the strongest smells of the village back then, of oxen and donkeys. Many of the new smells were of rusted metal emanating from yards we passed, and I knew that the mechanization dream of the People’s Communes had not been realized until land reform and independent farming were once again the backbone of agricultural policy. My nose told me that the village was awash in feelings of excitement and anxiety on the eve of major changes. People all wore peculiar expressions, as if they thought that something very big was about to happen.

We returned to the Ximen house, followed by Ximen Jinlong’s son, Ximen Huan, who was one of the last to arrive. I had no trouble spotting him by his smell, even though he reeked of fish and mud. He was naked but for a pair of nylon bathing trunks and a brand-name T-shirt thrown over his shoulder. He was carrying a line of silver-scaled little fish. An expensive watch glittered on his wrist. He spotted me first, dropped what he was carrying, and ran up to me. Obviously, he saw me as a ride, but no self-respecting dog was about to let something like that happen. I moved out of the way.

His mother, Huzhu, came running out of the house.

“Huanhuan!” she shouted. “Where have you been? And why are you so late? I told you your aunt and cousin Kaifang were coming.”

“I was fishing.” He picked up the line of fish to show her. “How could I not greet such honored guest without fish?” he said in a tone of voice that belied his young years.

Huzhu scooped up the shirt he’d tossed to the ground and said, “Who do you think you’re greeting with guppies like this?” She reached up and brushed the mud and scales out of her son’s hair. “Huanhuan,” she blurted out, “where are your shoes?”

He smiled. “I won’t lie to you, dear mother, I traded them for these fish.”

“What? You’re going to be the ruination of this family if you keep this up! Your father had someone bring those shoes from Shanghai. They were Nikes, a thousand yuan a pair. And these few guppies are what you got for them?”

“There are more than a few, Mama,” Ximen Huan said earnestly, counting the fish for all to see. “There are nine here. How can you say there are only a few?”

“See, everybody, what a foolish son I’m raising?” Huzhu took the line of fish from her son and held them high. “He went down to the river early this morning,” she said to the people crowding into the main house, “saying he was going to catch some fish for our guests. This is what he brought back after all that time. And he had to swap a pair of brand-new Nike sneakers to get them. Wouldn’t you say foolish is a good description?” In a blustery move, Huzhu smacked his shoulder with the line of fish and said, “Who’d you give the shoes to? I want you to go get them back.”

“Mama,” he said, looking at her out of the corner of his slightly crossed eye, “you don’t expect anyone worthy of respect to go back on his word, do you? It’s just a pair of sneakers. Why not just buy another pair? Dad’s got plenty of money!”

“Shut up, you little imp!” she said. “Who says your father has plenty of money?”

“If he doesn’t, then no one does,” he said with a sideward glance. “My father is a rich man, one of the richest anywhere!”

“Now you’re showing off, and showing how foolish you are,” his mother said. “I hope your father raises welts on your bottom when he gets home!”

“What’s going on?” Ximen Jinlong asked as he stepped out of his Cadillac. The car glided ahead silently. He was dressed for leisure. His head was shaved as clean as his cheeks, and he had a bit of a potbelly. Cell phone in hand, he was the prototypical big-time businessman. After hearing what Huzhu had to say, he patted his son on the head and said, “In economic terms, trading a pair of thousand-yuan Nikes for nine little guppies makes no sense. But from a moral perspective, willingly sacrificing a thousand-yuan pair of sneakers for some fish to greet visitors is unquestionably the right thing to do. So, based solely on this incident, I’ll neither praise nor punish you. But what I will praise you for”—at this point, Jinlong thumped his son on the shoulder —“is your adherence to the principle of ‘my word, once spoken, even a team of four horses cannot bring it back.’ Once the trade was made, you could not go back on your word.”

“What do you think of that?” Ximen Huan said to his mother, pleased with himself. He picked up the fish. “Grandma,” he said loudly, “take these and make some fish broth for our honored guests!”

“The way you’re spoiling him,” Huzhu said to Jinlong under her breath, “I hate to think how he’ll turn out.” She spun around and grabbed her son by the arm. “Go inside, little ancestor, and change your clothes. How can you think of greeting guests looking like this?”

“What a fine animal!” Ximen Jinlong remarked with a thumbs-up as soon as he saw me. Then he said hello to all the people who had walked outside to greet him. He sang your son’s praises: “Worthy nephew Kaifang, I can see you’ve got talent. You’re no ordinary young man. Your father is a deputy county chief, but you’ll be a provincial governor when you grow up!” Then he consoled Ma Gaige: “Stand up straight and proud, young man, there’s nothing for you to fear or worry about. You’ll never go hungry as long as your uncle has food on his table.” Then he turned to Baofeng. “Don’t be too hard on yourself. Don’t forget, no one can bring back the dead. You’re sad, well, so am I. Losing him was like losing my right arm.” He turned and nodded to the two elderly couples. Finally, he said to your wife, “I’d like to drink to my sister-in-law. At noon the other day, when I gave a celebratory banquet for the passage of our reconstruction plans, Jiefang was the one who suffered. That old scalawag Hong Taiyue may be stubborn, but you have to love him, and I hope a little jail time will teach him a lesson.”