by Han Shaogong
Then there was the soul-taking incantation. All you needed to do was take a strand of the offender's hair, "grind" the words of the incantation again and again, and the offender's mind would cloud over until he or she ended up a walking zombie.
After Master Black returned to the city on grounds of ill health, rumors started up. Some suspected Zhongqi's wife of "grinding" a curse at Master Black. Needless to say, I had no truck with such rumors. I'd seen that woman: she hated Master Black, but she didn't have an evil word in her. Sometimes she'd sigh idiotically in front of the women in her neighbors' houses, about how all her born days she'd never begged for wealth or sought long life, all she'd wanted was to give birth to two sons, big as horses, strong as oxen, dead ringers for Master Black. That way, at least, those two breasts of hers wouldn't have hung there all her life for no good reason.
*Three Seconds
: When Mou fisheng was still in Maqiao, his energy levels were quite excessive, and after finishing work he'd still want to play basketball. When the Educated Youth were too tired to play, he'd get together some local lads, or sometimes even run a few li to the middle school in the commune and play on until midnight, the bouncing ball shimmering in the moonlight.
His demands on his students were very strict: sometimes he'd whistle, point to someone on court, and yell: "Tie your pants higher!"
Both referee and coach, he even monitored his players' pants.
He made his students master the strictest rules of the basketball court, including the "three seconds" rule. Before he arrived, Maqiao's boys had already played ball, just not with many rules: you could bounce the ball twice, when things got really hairy you could run with the ball, the only thing you couldn't do was hit anyone. Mou Jisheng trained his students by the standards of the county's top team and introduced them to the "three seconds" rule. When I revisited Maqiao many years later, the village had a privately run culture institute and half a basketball court, where a few young men-all faces that were utterly unfamiliar to me-were kicking up quite a ruckus as they played. Only one thing sounded familiar: my heartbeat quickened at the way they were always shouting out "three seconds."
None of these young men knew who the Educated Youth had been. They had no idea who these people were, these people who, a long time ago, had stayed in the village for a few brief years, these people from barbarian parts who'd been guests in the village and had no deep understanding of Maqiao; neither was there any need to express interest. I strolled through the village. There wasn't a trace left of our years in Maqiao, even the old, familiar scratches on the mud wall had gone. Out of the few friends I vaguely remembered, none were to be found, all had departed this world one after another, either last year, or the year before, or three years before, or three years before that. With their passing, the Maqiao of my memories sank stone by stone, soon to disappear without a trace.
I'd lived here for six years. One gust of wind had scattered the days of those six years, leaving behind one lone relic: "three seconds"-although its meaning had changed. From what I could glean from watching the lads on the basketball court in front of me, "three seconds" not only outlawed hanging onto the ball for more than three seconds under the basket, it extended also to the flouting of all rules: hitting, shoving, running with the ball. Anything "three seconds" equaled "against the rules." In his time here, Mou Jisheng could never, ever have imagined this would come to pass.
*Lettuce Jade
: In the winter, when the commune would be wanting to build a grain store here, a middle school there, they were forever sending instructions down from above that each person was to contribute five fired bricks. Maqiao didn't have money for buying bricks and the villagers had to go to the mountains to dig up graves-overgrown, untended graves, of course.
The mountain-dwellers lived mainly in thatched barns or wooden houses, but their graves were anything but slapdash affairs, using great heaps of fired bricks to build immortal structures that would withstand centuries and millennia. These graves had been through too much history: most of the mounds had collapsed and been covered over with dense brambles and grass, with nothing to mark them out from regular fiat ground covered with vegetation-one cursory glance couldn't distinguish where the grave was. After we'd hacked away at the vegetation around the grave with sickles, and removed the topsoil with rakes, the blue bricks supporting the grave would slowly come into view, stone by stone. At this moment, the faint-hearted girls among the Educated Youth would scurry a long way off into terrified hiding. The men, each attempting to be braver than the next, would jostle to lodge the teeth of their rakes into the joins in the bricks, slowly heaving them to and fro until the bricks loosened and the first brick was pried off with a violent wrench.
If the grave had been fairly well preserved, it was like a pot well sealed against moisture: as the grave was broken open, a white mist would rise up, billowing in waves out of the pit and spreading in gusts a bitter stench of skeleton that turned the stomach. After the white vapor had slowly thinned into nothingness, we timidly crowded closer, peering at the black world within the grave through the gap opened up in the bricks. By the light of a quivering thread of penetrating sunlight, we could glimpse the once-human skeleton, its big empty eye sockets, or its broad pelvis. We could also glimpse random piles of earth and rotting wood. We grave-diggers wouldn't normally expect to find any treasures of gold and silver in the grave: we'd be doing well to come across one or two bronze or ceramic vessels. Many of the skeletons we saw had been positioned facing downwards: this meant our luck was definitely out. According to local custom, people like this had had bad ends, been struck by lightning, hanged, or shot, for example. Those who'd survived them hadn't wanted them to revisit the world of light and pass their bad luck on, had wanted at all costs to prevent them being reborn. Facing them downwards was a crucial step in ensuring they never revisited the light of day.
In death, as in life, different people receive different treatment.
There was one time when, digging out a female corpse, we discovered that although her bones were white, her hair was as glossily jet-black as if there was still breath in her and reached down almost to her waist. Her two incisors hadn't rotted either, and they gleamed and protruded out of her mouth in splendid isolation, a good three inches long, so it seemed. We fled in terror. In the end, after some inquiries, the team committee paid Master Black-who had no fear of ill omens-two catties of meat and one catty of wine to paraffin and burn the skeleton, to stop this female spirit making any further trouble. Years later, I learned from an academic that this is actually perfectly normal. Human death is a long, slow process, and given a congenial environment the hair and teeth will continue to grow. Foreign physicians had done plenty of research on the subject.
We started to carry down more and more bricks from the mountain. The skeletons, of course, were left, abandoned on the mountain. People said that wherever there was a concentration of eagles hovering and swooping back and forth in the sky over the mountains was probably where the strong, rank smell had stimulated their appetites. Others said that in the evenings you could hear the sounds of men howling and women crying on the mountain: surely it was the ghosts, cursing their grave-diggers as they froze with cold.
Nevertheless, we still went into the mountains every day to carry out our dastardly mission.
Normally, Zhaoqing was as cowardly as they came, but he never hung back when we were digging ancestral graves. I later discovered that the reason why he always pushed himself forward was because he hoped to find a rare treasure in the grave pit: shaped like an uneven parcel of vegetables and of a dazzling crimson color, growing on the tongue of the dead person, like human breath that had coagulated over a long period of time in the tomb and then bloomed forth with incredible beauty. The peasants called this thing resembling a parcel of vegetables "lettuce jade": it was the best tonic in the world, they said, an intense concentration of physical strength that could focus the spirit and enrich the blood, could add to th
e yin and strengthen the yang, could dispel wind, protect embryos, prolong life. There's a reference to it in The Extended Virtuous Words: "Just as there is no false gold, there is no true lettuce jade." The villagers also said not just anybody could posthumously exhale lettuce jade; only the mouths of the wealthy, of those who had tasted top-drawer delicacies, slept on cotton pillows, whose bodies had been nurtured in gold and jade while they lived, would bear fruit in one hundred years' time.
One day while digging in the ground, Zhaoqing suddenly let out a long, tragic sigh.
"It'll never happen, never happen. What's the point in going on?" He shook his head: "This rotten mouth of mine's never going to grow a lettuce jade."
Knowing what he meant, his listeners also turned mournful. They thought about the strips of sweet potato, the aged brown rice, and the blackened dried vegetables they swallowed every day: if even their bottoms couldn't produce any kind of a smell, what hope was there of growing a lettuce jade?
"Uncle Luo could grow one," Wanyu was very confident of this, "he's got a godson in barbarian parts who sends him money."
"Benyi's got a hope too, he's pretty sturdy, there's a lot of fat on him," Zhaoqing said. "The bastard, at those meetings he goes to every other day, they kill a pig every time, there's so much meat it bends their chopsticks."
"Cadre meetings are revolutionary work. You jealous, then?" Zhongqi said.
"What d'you mean, work? Aren't they just growing their lettuce jades?"
"You can't say that. If everyone grew a lettuce jade, lettuce jade would become too cheap, too common-d'you think it would've got into The Extended Virtuous Words like that?"
"I could've become a cadre during Land Reform." Shortie Zhao set full sail for a delicious, dreamy journey of remembrance.
"You-a cadre? You can't even write Shortie Zhao properly! If you ever got to be a cadre, I'd walk everywhere on my hands." Zhongqi thought this very funny and chuckled away for a while.
Zhaoqing said: "What about you, then, Zhong, you dragon you, carrying your quotation book around every day, wearing your Chairman Mao button, who're you trying to impress? D'ycm honestly think you can grow a lettuce jade?"
"I don't want one."
"You couldn't grow one."
"I'm not going to grow one, that way no one'll come and dig my grave."
"Reckon you're going to have a grave that people can come and dig?"
Zhaoqing's remark was rather below the belt. Since Zhongqi had no descendants, it was generally held that he ran the risk of having no one to bury him after he'd died; Zhaoqing, however, had produced five or six kids, so a remark like this from him was a blatant assertion of his superiority, and touched a raw nerve in his opponent.
"You stinking, farting scumbag, Zhao."
"You pig-sticker."
"Parents never washed your mouth out, did they?"
"No use if you did wash your mouth-your belly's so full of shit."
Their exchanges swiftly got wilder and filthier, before bystanders finally managed-with great difficulty-to intervene. In an effort to thaw the atmosphere a little, Fucha mentioned Secretary Zhou in the commune: what was Benyi compared to him? Benyi only got his mouth around some lard at his five meetings per month-that wasn't going to make much of a dent on a stomachful of sweet potato and brown rice. Only the commune cadres had it really good, touring here today, there tomorrow, always with a reception party at the ready, like it was New Year's every day. Just think about Secretary Zhou's juicy pink-and-white flesh, fattened on great vats of frying oil. His golden throat still sounded out clear as a gong even after a night of making reports, better even than Tiexiang's voice. He must be building up to an enormous lettuce jade.
Uncle Luo took over: "That's quite right: it's just as important to spot the big ones as to spot them at all. If Benyi's mouth grew a lettuce jade, it would be as big as a sweet potato at best, and even ten of them would be nothing to just one of Secretary Zhou's. You'd be far better off digging up Secretary Zhou's grave."
From Secretary Zhou, they moved onto Commune Head He, onto the bigwigs in the county, in the province, and finally to Chairman Mao. They all believed unanimously that Chairman Mao was the luckiest of all, his allotment of fortune the highest. His lettuce jade a hundred years from now would be something incredible, not just a panacea for all ills but a magical elixir of life. A national treasure like this, they reckoned, would need high-level chemical preservatives and a massive military guard day and night.
Having reflected on the matter, everyone concurred that was how it would be. By this time, the sun was already slanting to the west, so they hauled their rakes pensively onto their shoulders and headed for home.
A few days later, Secretary Zhou visited Maqiao to examine the brick recovery situation, and while he was about it asked me to help him write up some official materials on carbon paper, telling me again and again how elegant my imitation Song-style calligraphy was. Watching his beaming fat face, my thoughts kept on straying, as I imagined in his mouth a lettuce jade big as a parcel of vegetables that accompanied him everywhere he went. His voice was indeed resonant, always imitating the music in broadcasts, singing the newest song of praise for Beijing. He'd often ask me what I thought of his singing, listening to endless replays of my fawning compliments. He also asked me what sort of a Cultural Director I thought he'd make. Of course, I said, of course, you've got art in your bones, you're clearly the stuff Cultural Directors are made of. This made him even happier, kept him merrily humming away, and anyone he saw he'd greet warmly, ask them how their kids and their pigs were. The lettuce jade in his mouth began swelling to ever greater proportions, as if self-confidence dripped out of his very pores.
He got Benyi to take him to see the brick firing. I watched the lesser lettuce jade leading the greater lettuce jade-maybe soon we'd have baby lettuce jades carrying fired bricks I couldn't clear my befuddled head of these fantasies. I must've been digging too many graves lately, I thought, my head was full of bad stuff, full of the smell of corpses.
"Tell me, apart from imitation Song-style, what other calligraphy styles look good?"
"Lettuce jade."
"What did you say?"
"Er, what was it you…"
"I asked what other calligraphy styles look good."
I suddenly came to and hurriedly answered his question about calligraphy.
*Presenting the Vine
: Yellow vine was a highly poisonous species of plant: women who wanted to commit suicide usually went up the hillside and dug up some yellow vine, as did men planning to poison fish and shrimps in shallow, stagnant, slow-flowing bends in the river. A length of yellow vine knotted three times, with a piece of chicken feather inserted, or drenched in a bowl of chicken blood, presented to the enemy, was the final diplomatic communication before two sides met in war. Once this step had been taken, it meant things had already gotten pretty bad, and the conflict was irresolvable without some loss of life.
It was said that in the early years of the Republic, Maqiao people presented the vine to Longjia Sands. Returning home one day with an ox he'd bought, a certain Father Xingjia of Longjia Sands passed by a relative's house and popped in for a bite to eat and drink, leaving the ox tied up outside the main door. When he was, say, seventy or eighty percent drunk, he heard the sound of an ox lowing outside the door and asked a child to go outside and have a look. After taking a look, the child came back and said an unknown black ox had climbed onto the back of their ox. Father Xingjia was furious: he'd just brought his ox back from the market, what kind of a brute was this other animal? Raping it before he'd got his breath back?
Everyone jostled their way out the door, but found the owner of the black ox was nowhere to be seen. Rather the worse for wear and in a fit of drunken bravado, Father Xingjia's nephew grabbed a flaming branch and lashed out with it, jabbing it straight into the black ox's shoulder joint. With a great bray, the animal cantered off, taking with it the flaming branch, swinging and lurching as it
went. Plunged deep in, the branch had, it would seem, wounded it to the very heart; after running home, the ox died that same day.
The ox was from Maqiao. The following day, Maqiao sent someone over with a yellow vine soaked in chicken blood.
The battle raged for ten days and Maqiao had by far the worst of it. The Peng family from Longjia Sands had a huge ancestral temple and, aiming to defeat Maqiao straight off, called up namesakes from a surrounding radius of thirty-six bows to come and help the village. Hopelessly outnumbered, the Maqiao forces had no choice but to ask an intermediary to make peace. Following the mediation, not only did the people of Maqiao not recover the money for the ox, they had to pull down houses and sell grain to compensate Longjia Sands to the tune of a copper gong, four pigs, and a six-table banquet, before the matter was settled. The Maqiao representatives dispatched to present compensation to Longjia Sands went banging drums: four old and four young there were, eight altogether, all with pants tied around their heads, all carrying bundles of rice straw on their backs to express the shame of defeat. Although they received ajar of wine from their adversaries as a gesture of friendship, they returned to the village with tears streaming down their faces, and kneeled, one after another, rooted to the ground before the ancestral tablet, intoning over and over how they'd betrayed their ancestors, how they no longer had the face to live. All night they drank, till their eyes were bloodshot, before finally swallowing yellow vine. On the morning of the following day, eight stiff corpses were carried out of the ancestral temple as the villagers all joined together in unanimous lament. Some of the abandoned graves I dug a few decades later, it was said, belonged to these people. Zhaoqing sighed, saying their descendants either died, or fled. Zhaoqing also said that the year the vine was presented happened to be a year of famine as well: none of the dead had had much to eat, none of them had had their fill of gruel, so of course their graves couldn't grow any lettuce jades.
