The Four Books (39 page)

6.
Old Course
, pp. 476–87

Whether on account of that womanly love or the half bag of fried soybeans that the Musician’s death had left me, I clearly couldn’t simply carry her back to one of those morgue rooms. Instead, I felt it was only right that I bury her in the wasteland behind the compound.

I therefore carried her corpse back. I had to stop to rest eight or nine times along the way, and it wasn’t until the sun was already sinking below the horizon that I finally reached that wasteland where we had already buried more than a dozen other famine victims. There was a shovel and an axe lying over the grave of one professor, and more than a dozen graves were piled so high with sand and dust that they looked like so many mounds of earth. I laid the Musician’s body on the ground next to the graves of her comrades, then sat down and ate that last handful of the soybeans I had in my pocket. Next, I went to a ditch filled with stagnant water, broke off a final chunk of frozen ice, and let it melt in my mouth. Finally, I began digging the Musician a grave. I knew that technically it was the Scholar who should be digging the grave. It was the Scholar she loved, and not me. But in order to be able to righteously eat the soybeans in front of him, I didn’t immediately report her death. Instead I cleared a space between two graves and began to dig a pit. Because I had to turn around every time I tossed out a spadeful of soil, I could see the Musician’s body half sitting there facing me. Although her face was dark green, her partially closed eyes were filled with a mysterious, murky light. She seemed to be staring at me, as though she wanted to tell me something. Therefore, each time I dug a spadeful, I would turn and address her. I asked,

“Have I done you right?”

After asking her this, I turned and dug another spadeful, then said, “Don’t worry, in a little bit I’ll go find the Scholar for you.” I dug yet another spadeful and asked, “Do you really love the Scholar?” Slowly, one spadeful at a time, I told the Musician a lot of nonsensical things. By the time the pit was three feet deep and I was completely exhausted, I lay down in the pit myself. I assessed the pit’s size and evenness, then dug up the area in front, placing a pile of soft dirt in the middle of the pit and then climbing out. By this point the sun was beginning to dip below the horizon, dyeing the clouds a golden color and leaving half the sky bright red, as though it were on fire. This reminded me of the fiery furnaces along the Yellow River the previous winter. I turned westward, and there was a bone-chilling wind blowing against my back and neck. There was still a trace of the sun’s warmth in this empty plain along the old course of the river, but the frozen ground had already begun to turn bitter cold. So as not to let the Musician be chilled by the cold soil, I wanted to let her body lie in the middle of the pit for a while to warm up. But when I tried to move her corpse, I discovered she had become so heavy that I couldn’t even lift her. Placing one hand under her shoulder and the other under her back, I tried three times to pick her up, but simply couldn’t budge her. At the thought of having carried her eight or nine
li
and then having spent the equivalent of an entire mealtime digging her grave, only to discover that she was now so heavy that it was impossible to move her, I was overcome with horror.

I stared at the icy green tint of her face and saw that her teeth were clinched together and it seemed as though I could almost hear the sound of her grinding her teeth. Her face, which used to be oval, was now the shape of a long melon or a frozen cucumber. In the end, I managed to see in it a lot of anger and melancholia, as though there was too much that she had left unresolved, which she had not been able to talk about when she was alive, but now that she was dead these emotions became clearly visible. This discovery gave me a chill, and I began to shudder uncontrollably. It was as if she still had countless questions for me. Facing her distorted face, I saw a murky light in her half-closed eyes, and as I felt a cold surge through my heart, my legs began to tremble uncontrollably.

“It’s not that I myself want to bury you,” I told her. “I know that you and the Scholar haven’t yet seen each other. I simply want you to lie down in the grave to warm up a bit.”

I said several more things to her, and in this way put my heart more at ease.

To tell the truth, I was not afraid of death, and neither was I afraid of the dead. Among the surviving residents of the ninety-ninth, some feared hunger but no one feared either death or the dead. But at that moment the Musician, lying there stiff in her grave, didn’t inspire me to go hug her, and instead I felt a mysterious sense of dread, and even terror, upon seeing her greenish face. I stood frozen in front of her corpse, and after a moment said a few things to try to reassure her. As the sun moved toward the west, my mind turned once again to those things I didn’t want to contemplate. I instinctively reached into her mouth to look for some additional soybeans, hoping to eat another handful and regain the energy I needed to pick her up again, but I didn’t find even a single one. I had no choice but to continue watching over her as I waited for the sun to set. Eventually, I combed her black, windswept hair, and smoothed down her wrinkled clothes. But when I touched her icy cold wrist and fingers, I instinctively took half a step back.

I knew that it was my hand that had grazed hers, but I nevertheless had the uncanny sensation that her hand had moved, as though she had tried to grab me.

“I don’t have any strength left,” I told her. “I need to go eat some soybeans and collect your things, and then the Scholar and I will return to bury you.”

As I was saying this, I started to withdraw. I assumed that, given I barely had any energy left, I would have to lean against the walls in order to make my way back, but instead discovered that I didn’t need any support after all. When I arrived at the Child’s door I found it tightly closed, as it had been for ages, and the dirt ground of the courtyard was still covered with a dizzying array of footsteps. The bitter cold and loneliness I experienced was like the Musician’s greenish face. I had originally planned to first return to my room and eat some fried soybeans, and then wait for the Scholar so that we might go together to collect the Musician’s belongings. However, I immediately proceeded to the women’s dormitory.

Everything was as I expected. In the wooden chest under the Musician’s cot I found some clothes she often wore, and in a cardboard box in her cabinet, next to a sewing kit, I found a bottle of cold cream that still had some lotion inside. In the pillowcase she had fashioned from pieces of clothing, I discovered several volumes on the history of music, together with her copy of
La Dame aux Camélias
. Inside the book, as I had secretly suspected, I found more than a dozen pages from my own
Criminal Records
. These were all ones I had written for the Child, and they concerned the Musician and the people with whom she had been involved. For instance, there were my descriptions of her rendezvous with the Scholar, including their habits and their secret signs. It was precisely on account of this page and a half that she and the Scholar had been taken away. There was also the time that she and the Scholar were debating the Child’s age, and she claimed that although the Child was chronologically young, emotionally he was already mature; and that although physically he appeared quite normal, mentally he was not at all. There was also a description of the time when she and the Scholar were taken to be punished, and of how when they returned to the riverbank to collect sand and smelt steel, she would always secretly send the Scholar pickled vegetables she had somehow managed to procure.

The Musician’s cot was positioned next to the wall behind the door, such that the sunlight shining in through the window covered the front of her bunk like mud—shining directly onto those dozen or so pages of my
Criminal Records
. Staring at those pages I realized why the Musician had suddenly become so heavy that I couldn’t lift her, why she always regarded me with that cold gaze, and why she had tugged at my hand with her fingers. I glanced over the red grid of the composition paper the Child had issued me, looking at my neat and meticulous handwriting. That writing, which had originally been in dark blue, had already turned dark green. Every character on that sheet of paper was like my fingerprints on an official document. As I stared at the sheets, my thoughts were in disarray. This meant that the Musician must have known all along that I was an informant for the ninety-ninth! And if she knew, then the Scholar must have known as well. Upon realizing that the Musician and the Scholar knew full well what I was doing, and yet still continued sending each other their secret signals, I suddenly felt as though I had been stripped naked by them. And at the thought that I would need to face the Scholar later that evening, I felt a sharp thorn in my heart. . . . My God! . . . Remembering how I had sliced my fingers, my wrists, my arms, and my legs to irrigate the wheat with my own blood, it occurred to me that I should slice two pieces of flesh from my body—from my thighs—boil them, and present them to the Musician’s grave, inviting everyone to eat them while I watched.

I knew that if I did this, it would bring me a tremendous feeling of relief.

At that moment, it also occurred to me that I should kneel down before those dozen or so manuscript pages on the Musician’s bed, and I wished that in doing so everything could thereby be resolved. But the idea of slicing two slabs of my flesh and boiling them pricked my soul like a thorn, and the desire to kneel down could in no way substitute for it. I knew that I should kneel before the Musician’s possessions and offer some sort of explanation. In the end I didn’t, nor did I say anything. Instead, I was possessed with that idea of slicing my own flesh and I simply stared in shock, experiencing that agony of cutting myself, which would be immediately followed by an ineffable feeling of relief coursing through my body. I knew I was under no obligation to act on this notion that had suddenly popped into my head. Although the idea was enough to make my legs tremble in agony, the sense of relief and ecstasy I would feel afterward pierced my heart like a ray of sunshine in the middle of a cold winter. It gave me an intense sense of desire and longing, leaving me with a bloodlust that led me in a bitter direction. In the end, I took those dozen or so pages from my
Criminal Records
and left the Musician’s room. Because my head was pounding and my legs were shaking, I had no choice but to lean against the door frame as I headed out. However, the strange feeling of comfort that I had after the arrival of this bloodlust also gave me a spring in my step as though I had just filled my belly with food.

As the light from the setting sun shone across the compound, mixing with the dirt and sand on the ground, it was difficult to distinguish the sunlight from the dirt and sand. There was a young person—perhaps it was that associate professor from the institute of physical culture who savagely beat me that night on the riverbank, and then was the first to piss on my head and slap my face with his penis—exiting the first row of buildings, but he soon headed out of the courtyard with another instructor. The two of them walked so quickly, it seemed as though they had just eaten a full meal. After they left, the courtyard once again reverted to its former stillness, to the point that you could hear the sunlight coursing through the sand and dust. I walked through that stillness back to my room. When I remembered that feeling of bloodlust that initially had come over me at the thought of confronting the Musician and the Scholar, it felt like a dagger impaled in my skull that I was unable to extract, and which kept twisting and turning, not only giving me a splitting headache but also making my legs tremble uncontrollably, making me walk as though I were floating on air. My calves trembled and convulsed, to the point that I couldn’t continue forward without leaning against the walls. However, that thought also gave me a tremendous feeling of lightness and urgency, and left my palms completely covered in sweat.

When I entered the room, I sat down on the empty cot that had belonged to the Theologian and immediately noticed the odor of the soybeans hidden underneath. This time I didn’t have the faintest desire to eat them. My mind kept returning to that urgent need to slice off two chunks of my own flesh. The room was very quiet, and apart from the faint scent of soybeans, there was virtually no difference between this room and the one that was now being used as a morgue. Facing that cot where I had slept with the Scholar, I gazed at those two piles of unfolded bedding and the Scholar’s shoes under the bed, together with the remnants of the desk chair that had been taken apart and burned. The black porcelain basin that had been used for boiling leather shoes and belts was hanging from the wall, and below it there was some kindling, together with the old kitchen knife that the Jurist had found in the canteen. My legs trembled again at the thought that I should slice off two pieces of my own flesh and feed them to the Musician and the Scholar, and a feeling of warmth coursed through my body. Sitting there motionless, I reflexively stuck my hands into my pants and stroked my thighs, which began to warm up even more. As this warmth was transferred to my hands, it began to float in front of my eyes like rosy sunlight.

Like that time half a year earlier while growing wheat on that sand dune, I could see the distant sun was shining, though where I was standing it was raining. This sunny rain poured over the dried-up sand dunes, and under that gentle drizzle, I sliced open my fingers and wrists, opening my arteries and veins and letting the blood pour out. At the time, the distant sun was bright yellow, but the rain overhead was pearly white, like a cloud of jade dust falling from the sky. When the sunlight shone down on that grain of wheat, I could see ripples from a drop of liquid inside the transparent grain. But as I walked along my plots of land distributing my blood, my arms fed several dozen rows, like a pair of fountains spurting bloodred liquid in all directions and leaving behind countless droplets of jadelike blood. Some of these drops of blood mixed with the raindrops, forming a sheet of red water. Others hung in the air between the raindrops, searching for space through which to fall. That entire field was filled with red grains, which sparkled in the sunlight like flames. As I stood under that red rain, I saw the bloody raindrops dancing in the sky, one transparent strand after another twisting and falling to the ground. When I looked out through that rainy curtain, I saw that the sun was still shining brightly, like a huge fire burning in the distance. But when I lowered my head, I saw that the wheat leaves were covered with a combination of beads of blood and drops of water, and the fields were flowing with a mixture of blood and rain that alternated between light and dark red, as though it were a dyeing mill. I saw the uppermost grain of wheat sucking the blood rain like an infant sucking milk, and the wheat leaves sprinkling drops of blood-water in all directions. After the thick smell of blood dissipated and mixed with the scent of wheat, I became surrounded by a fresh new aroma.