Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

by Mo Yan

  “Liar!” Kaifang said, covering his face with his hands and starting to sob. “You’re lying. Tell me you haven’t done any of those things.”

  “What if I have? And what if I haven’t? What business is it of yours?” She sneered. “Am I your wife? Your lover? My folks have washed their hands of me, so what makes you different?”

  “I love you, that’s what!” he was screaming.

  “Don’t use that disgusting word with me! Get out of here, poor little Kaifang.” She waved the monkey over and said, “Dear little monkey, let’s you and me go to bed.”

  The monkey sprang onto her bed.

  Kaifang drew his pistol and pointed it at the monkey.

  Fenghuang wrapped her arms around her monkey and said angrily:

  “Shoot me first, Lan Kaifang!”

  Kaifang’s passions were running high by then. He’d heard rumors that she’d been a prostitute, and he wasn’t sure if he believed them or not. But when she maliciously told him to his face that she’d slept not only with thousands of men but with her monkey, it was as if a volley of arrows had pierced his heart.

  Shocked and hurt, he stumbled out of the room and ran up the stairs, out of the hotel, and onto the square, his churning mind and heart erasing all threads of thought. As he passed a bar lit up by neon signs, two heavily made-up women dragged him inside. Seated on a high bar stool, he slugged down three shots of brandy and then laid his head down on the bar as a woman with blond hair, dark circles under her eyes, bright red lips, and lots of skin, front and back, drifted up to him — he never went to see Fenghuang in uniform — to reach out and touch his blue birthmark. As a recently arrived butterfly from the countryside, she didn’t realize that he was a policeman. Almost as a conditioned reflex, he grabbed her by the wrist, drawing a shriek from her. He smiled apologetically and let go. She rubbed up against him and said flirtatiously, “Elder Brother has quite a grip!”

  Kaifang waved her away, but she pressed her hot bosom up to him and sent blasts of air reeking of cigarette smoke and liquor into his face.

  “Why are you so sad, Elder Brother? Did some little vixen break your heart? Women are all the same. But your little sister here can make you feel better. ...”

  As pangs of loathing swept through his heart, Kaifang was thinking: I’ll get even with you, you whore!

  He tumbled off the bar stool, and “little sister” led him by the hand down a dark corridor and into a will-o’-the-wisp room, where, without a word, she stripped and lay out on the bed. She still had a nice figure, with full breasts, a flat tummy, and long legs. Since this was the first time our good Kaifang had laid eyes on a naked woman’s body, it had its desired effect, although he was more nervous than anything. She, on the other hand, quickly tired of his faltering. Time, after all, is money in her profession. She sat up.

  “Come on,” she said, “what are you waiting for? You can knock off the little-boy act!”

  Unfortunately for her, as she sat up her blond wig slipped off and revealed a flattened head with sparse hair, which bowled Kaifang over. Pang Fenghuang’s lovely face beneath a full head of blond hair floated before his eyes. He took a hundred-yuan note out of his pocket, tossed it to the woman, and turned to leave, but not before she jumped to her feet and wrapped herself around him like an octopus.

  “You no-account prick!” she cursed. “You’re not getting away that easy, not for a measly hundred yuan!”

  She reached down and felt around in his pants while she was cursing, looking for money, of course, but what her hand bumped into was a hard, cold handgun. Knowing he couldn’t let her pull her hand back, he grabbed her wrist for the second time. The beginnings of a scream leaked out of her mouth before she could swallow the rest of it as Kaifang gave her a shove and sent her stumbling back onto the bed.

  Kaifang emerged onto the square, where he was hit by a blast of cold air. The alcohol he’d consumed came rushing up into his throat and out onto the ground. The emptying of his stomach served to clear his head, but did nothing to ease the pain in his heart. His mood swung between teeth-clenching anger and heartwarming affection. He hated Fenghuang, and he loved her. When the hatred rose in him, it was swamped by love; when the love ascended, it was beaten back by hatred. During the two days and nights he struggled with these competing feelings, he turned his pistol on himself and contemplated pulling the trigger more than once. Don’t do it, boy! It’s not worth it! Finally, reason won out over emotion.

  “She may be a whore,” he said softly to himself, “but I still want her.”

  Having made up his mind, once and for all, he returned to the hotel, where he knocked on her door.

  “What, you back again?” she said, sounding thoroughly fed up. But he had obviously changed over the past two days. His birthmark was darker, his face thinner, and his brows looked like a pair of caterpillars squirming above his eyes, which were blacker and brighter than before; his glare, so intense it felt as if it were scorching her, and not just her, but her monkey as well, drove the monkey into a corner, where he cowered. “Well, since you’re here,” she said, her tone softer, “you might as well sit down. We can be friends if you’d like, but don’t let me hear any more talk about love.”

  “I not only want to talk about love, I want you to be my wife.” With a hard edge to his voice, he continued, “I don’t care if you’ve slept with ten thousand men, or with a monkey, or, for that matter, a tiger or an alligator, I want to marry you.”

  That was met with silence. Then, with a laugh, she said:

  “Calm down, little Blue Face. You can’t throw a word like love around, and that goes double for marriage.”

  “I’m not throwing them around,” he said. “Over the past two days I’ve thought things out carefully. I’m going to give it up, deputy chief, my career as a policeman, everything. I’ll be your gong-beater and become a street performer with you.”

  “Enough of that crazy talk. You can’t throw away your future over a woman like me.” Feeling a need to dampen his enthusiasm and lighten the atmosphere, she said, “Tell you what, I’ll marry you if you can turn your blue face white.”

  As they say, “Casual words have powerful effects.” Making jokes to a man as deeply in love as he was dangerous business.

  Lan Kaifang took sick leave, not caring if his superiors approved or not, and went to Qingdao, where he underwent painful skin graft surgery. When he next showed up at the hotel basement, his face swathed in bandages, Fenghuang was stunned. So was her monkey, possibly recalling the swathed face of Ximen Huan’s killer. He snarled and attacked Kaifang, who knocked him out with a single punch. Then he turned to Fenghuang and, like a man possessed, said:

  “I’ve had a skin graft.”

  She stood there looking at him as tears welled up in her eyes. He got down on his knees, wrapped his arms around her legs, and laid his head against her belly. She stroked his hair.

  “How foolish you are,” she said, nearly sobbing. “How can you be so foolish?”

  They embraced, and she gently kissed the side of his face where there was no pain. He picked her up and carried her over to the bed, where they made love.

  Blood covered the sheet.

  “You’re a virgin!” he said in surprised delight, his tears soaking the bandages covering half his face. “You’re a virgin, my Fenghuang, my love. Why did you say all those things?”

  “Who says I’m a virgin?” she said with a pout. “Eight hundred yuan is all it costs to repair a maidenhead.”

  “You’re lying again, you little whore, my Fenghuang. . . .” Mindless of the pain, he planted kisses on the body of the prettiest girl in Gaomi County — the whole world, in his eyes.

  Fenghuang stroked his body, hard yet pliable, as if put together with branches of a tree, and said, sounding utterly forlorn:

  “My god, there’s no way I can get away from you. . . .”

  Dear reader, I’d rather not continue with my story, but since I’ve given you a beginning, I need to giv
e you an ending. So here it comes in all its cruelty.

  Kaifang returned to 1 Tianhua Lane, his face still swathed in bandages, which threw a scare into Lan Jiefang and Huang Huzhu, who had had all the surprises they could take. Kaifang ignored their questions about his face and said passionately, in obvious high spirits:

  “Papa, Aunty, I’m going to marry Fenghuang!”

  With a pained furrowing of his brow, my friend Jiefang said decisively:

  “No, you’re not!”

  “Why?”

  “Because I say so!”

  “You don’t believe all those scurrilous rumors, do you? You have my word, she’s absolutely chaste ... a virgin. . . .”

  “My god!” my friend exclaimed plaintively. “You can’t do it, son. . . .”

  “Where love and marriage are concerned, Papa,” Kaifang said, his anger rising, “it’s my life and you have nothing to say about it.”

  “Maybe I don’t, son, but listen to what your aunt has to say” Jiefang went into his room and shut the door.

  “Kaifang, poor Kaifang,” Huang Huzhu said to him tearfully. “Fenghuang is your uncle’s daughter. You and she have the same grandmother.”

  At that point Kaifang reached up and ripped the bandages off of his face, taking the new skin off with it and leaving a bloody wound. He ran out of the house and jumped on his motorcycle, speeding away in such a hurry that his wheel banged against the door of a beauty salon, scaring the wits out of the people inside. He lifted the front wheel and sped like a crazed horse straight to the train station square. He never heard the words of the beautician whose shop was next door to the house:

  “Everyone in that family is mad!”

  Kaifang staggered down the steps of the hotel and crashed through the door. Fenghuang was in bed waiting for him. The monkey attacked him, but this time he forgot all about police procedures, forgot just about everything. He drew his pistol and shot the monkey dead, bringing an end to the reincarnation cycle for a soul that had spun on the wheel of life for half a century.

  Fenghuang was struck dumb by what he’d done. He raised his pistol and pointed it at her. Don’t do it, my young friend — he gazed at Fenghuang’s beautiful face, like a precious jade carving — the prettiest face in the world — the pistol drooped of its own weight. He raised it again and ran out the door to the steps leading upstairs — like a ladder leading from hell up to heaven — our young friend’s legs turned rubbery and he fell to his knees. Then he pressed the muzzle of his pistol up against a heart that was already broken — Don’t do it, don’t be foolish — he pulled the trigger. A muffled explosion sent our Kaifang sprawling on the steps, dead.

  58

  Millennium Boy

  Dear reader, our tale is drawing to a close. Bear with me a while longer, that’s all, just a while longer.

  Lan Jiefang and Huang Huzhu took Kaifang’s ashes back to the plot of land that was now dotted with graves and buried them alongside Huang Hezuo. While they were cremating and burying their son, Fenghuang followed them, carrying the body of her monkey and weeping uncontrollably She was so haggard everyone who saw her took pity on her. As sensible people, now that Kaifang was dead, Jiefang and Huzhu spoke no more of what had brought them to that point. Since the monkey was beginning to smell, Fenghuang took their advice to let him go, but asked that he be buried along with the people there. My friend unhesitatingly said yes. And so, now there was a monkey lying alongside a donkey, an ox, a pig, and a dog. Stuck for how to console Fenghuang, my friend brought together the surviving members of the two families. Chang Tianhong had nothing to offer, nor did Huang Huzhu. In the end it was Baofeng:

  “Gaige, ask her to come here and we’ll see what she plans to do. She started life here on our kang, and we have a duty to give her what she wants, whatever it takes.”

  Gaige returned with news that she was gone.

  Like a river, time flows on and on. We are now in the waning days of the year 2000. Gaomi County was celebrating the dawning of the new millennium with lights and streamers in front of every house in the city. Towering count-down clocks had been erected in the train station square and Tianhua Square, where pyrotechnic specialists waited to have their fireworks light up the sky at the stroke of midnight.

  As evening settled in, snow began to fall, with flakes dancing amid the bright lights and turning the night into a thing of beauty. Just about everyone in the city walked outside, some heading toward Tianhua Square, others for the train station square, and some just strolling up and down People’s Avenue.

  My friend and Huang Huzhu were among the few people who stayed inside. Here permit me to add a comment: They never did register as husband and wife. It didn’t seem to make any difference to either of them. Well, after making some pork-filled dumplings they hung a pair of red lanterns outside their door and stuck some of Huzhu’s paper cutouts in the window. The dead cannot be brought back to life, and everyone else has to keep on living, whether they do so by crying or laughing. That is what my friend often said to his partner. They ate the dumplings that night, watched a bit of TV, and, as was their habit, memorialized the dead by making love. But only after brushing Huzhu’s hair, as we’ve already seen. What I want to say here is, in the midst of their mixed sorrow and joy, Huzhu abruptly rolled over in bed, wrapped her arms around my friend, and said:

  “Starting tonight, we can be human again. . . .”

  Their tears wetted one another’s face.

  At eleven o’clock they were jolted out of their sleep by the ringing of their telephone. It was the train station hotel. A woman on the other end told them that their daughter-in-law, who was in Room 101, had gone into labor, news that first puzzled them. Finally, it dawned on them that the woman about to give birth was Pang Fenghuang, who had been missing all these months.

  Knowing there was no one they could call for assistance, and not really wanting to call anyone in the first place, they made their way to the square as fast as their frail legs would take them. Breathlessly, they ran and walked, walked and ran, making their way through crowded streets. There were people everywhere, on wide avenues and in narrow lanes. At first the crowds were heading south, but once my friend and his woman crossed People’s Avenue, the crowds were heading north. Their anxieties quickened, their pace did not, as snow fell on their heads and blew into their faces. The swirling snowflakes were like falling apricot petals. The old apricot tree in the Ximen family compound had shed its flowers, so had the apricot trees at the Ximen Village pig farm, and all of them were being blown into town; all the falling apricot petals in China were blowing into Gaomi County, into the city.

  Like a pair of lost children, they elbowed their way into the square, where young men and women were dancing and singing atop a tower that had been thrown up on the eastern edge. Apricot petals were dancing in the air. A thousand heads were bobbing on the square. The people, in new clothes, were singing and jumping and clapping and stomping their feet along with the music coming from the tower. Apricot petals were swirling among the dancers, who were dancing amid the swirling apricot petals. The digital clock was counting down, second by second. The climactic moment was approaching. The music and the singing stopped; the square was silent. My friend and his woman took the stairs down to the hotel basement. She hadn’t had time to put her hair up; it trailed behind her like a tail. They opened the door of Room 101 and saw the face of Fenghuang, as pure as an apricot blossom. They also saw that the lower half of her body was covered in blood, in the center of which lay a chubby little baby boy. At that moment, fireworks lit up the sky of Gaomi County’s new century, the first of a new millennium. The baby was a millennium boy; he’d come into the world via a normal birth. Two other babies had arrived as millennium babies in Gaomi’s hospital, but they’d been delivered by caesarean section.

  My friend and his woman picked up the baby, their grandchild, who bawled in Huzhu’s arms. As his tears fell, Jiefang draped a dirty sheet over Fenghuang. She was virtually transparent, since a
ll the blood had flowed out of her body. Her ashes, of course, were buried in the now famous family cemetery, next to Lan Kaifang.

  My friend and his woman raised the big-headed baby with great care. He’d been born with a strange bleeding disease that the doctors called hemophilia, for which there was no cure. He would die, sooner rather than later. But when he bled, Huang Huzhu pulled a hair from her head, turned it to ashes under a flame, and put some of it in his milk and sprinkled the rest over the injury. While this was not a cure, it worked as an emergency treatment when needed. And so this child’s life was tied inextricably to the hair of my friend’s woman. As long as the hair held out, the boy would live; when it was gone, he would die. In this case, the heavens took pity, for the more hair she pulled out, the more hair grew in. So we needn’t worry that the boy will die young.

  He differed from other children right from birth. Small in body, he had a remarkably big head, in which near total recall and a extraordinary gift for language existed. Although his grandparents could not help thinking about his unusual entrance into the world, after talking it over, they decided he deserved to be given the family name Lan. And since he’d been born as the clock rang in the new millennium, they called him Qiansui, or “Thousand-Year.” On the day of his fifth birthday, he summoned my friend, his grandfather, spread his arms like a storyteller, and embarked upon the narration of a long tale:

  “My story begins on January 1, 1950. ...”