Hard Like Water

by Yan Lianke

  She looked around and said, “Aijun, this is simply too dangerous. It won’t work at all. Tomorrow, the second team of investigators will arrive, and if we are observed, all that we have achieved will be lost.”

  I said, “Hongmei, I was appointed committee member of the town’s Party committee, and Bureau Director Li of the county committee bureau personally told me that after this next meeting there will be an announcement, after which a formal document will be issued.”

  Hongmei looked as though she couldn’t believe her ears, but after seeing my red face and my crazed expression, she didn’t say a word. Instead, she retreated to the edge of the wheat field and looked around, and when she returned she pulled me between two haystacks. She pulled down some straw and created a mat on the ground, then quickly stripped off her clothing.

  The snow-white straw she pulled down emitted a warm smell of grass and earth mixed with a musty scent of rain and snow that came in bursts as she dug into the straw. It was as though she had opened the window for the odors to be released after they had been enclosed all winter. These warm, musty odors surged out from the wheat stalks, filling the space between the two haystacks. It felt like we were covered by a blanket of this hot white scent, and the late winter and early spring chill was banished. It had been a long time since I had had a chance to inspect her naked body, because each time we caressed each other like thieves, we were always so rushed and frantic, so timid and scared. But on this day, on the eve of my appointment as a member of the town’s Party committee, the joy we felt upon seeing our revolution’s continued success made me feel light-headed. It dispelled our caution and displaced our timidity. We were only a half li from the village, and only two hundred meters from Cheng Temple. All we needed to do was take a few steps around that hill, cross the stone bridge over the irrigation canal, and we would arrive in the village and at Cheng Temple. We were oblivious to everything. Hongmei threw down her clothing and then stood between the two haystacks, just like the time she stripped and stood in the opening of the tomb. A soft white glow and fragrance emanated from her body, as her feet—and her ten bright red toenails—were buried under the straw and her gaze lingered over my body.

  “Congratulations on your promotion, Aijun,” she said. “Good things come to those who wait.”

  I began unbuttoning my shirt, and said, “One day I’ll become a real national cadre, released from production duties, and you can follow me as Party branch secretary. If I’m appointed mayor, you can be the deputy mayor.”

  She said, “Don’t remove your clothes right now. Instead, look at me and see if I look any different.”

  I paused, then inspected her again. Suddenly, I noticed that she had a beautiful heart-shaped badge hanging from a red string around her neck. The badge was the size of a button, and was positioned between her breasts—like the sun rising from behind the Balou Mountains on a winter morning. I asked, “Is it good to have that souvenir badge hanging from there?” She replied, “This is my revolutionary amulet.” Then she asked, “What else do you notice?” I shifted my gaze down and was startled to discover that her abdomen had grown significantly larger, and the stretch marks below her belt had become shallower.

  “Are you pregnant?”

  She shook her head, and her smile seemed to gain an added layer of color.

  I said, “You’re fatter.”

  She asked, “Do you prefer me fat or thin?”

  I said, “I like you both ways.”

  She said, “If you like me dainty like a city woman, then I’ll simply eat less.”

  “It’s good if you’re a bit plump.” While saying this, I gently caressed her abdomen, and as I did so I felt her belly tremble under my finger. I caressed her abdomen a couple more times, whereupon she began to turn pale, and her gaze became fiery. I knew that before we did that thing, she always wanted me to appreciate her naked body, to caress her and say the sorts of things she loved to hear. I said, “Hongmei, you are even more entrancing than ever, and it’s as though your entire body were made of jade.” Smiling, she leaned against me, and as she did so I removed my shirt and fell back onto the haystack.

  “I also haven’t done that thing for a long time,” she murmured, as she gazed up at the sky through the gaps in the straw. “You probably won’t believe me, but Qingdong is ill and is only half a man anyway, and ever since that day in the tomb, I haven’t let him touch me. No matter how much Chinese medicine he takes and how many times he kneels down before me, I still won’t let him touch me.”

  I experienced a brief moment of shock and remembered the time I saw Cheng Qingdong brewing his medicine under the window.

  She asked, “What are you staring at? Aren’t you cold?”

  I responded, “Is Qingdong really impotent?”

  She said, “He drinks Chinese medicine every day.”

  I said, “That’s good, then. Guizhi is dead, and Qingdong is ill.” As I said this, I finished removing my clothes. I knew that I should thank her—to express my appreciation for her not having permitted Qingdong to touch her. By this point I had already stripped naked and didn’t want to say anything else. The volcano’s magma had already melted the quartz and had reached the earth’s crust. I found myself unable to say a word. There was no time to say anything. My scorchingly hot gaze shifted from her abdomen down to her private parts. That gold-red-black-yellow triangle completely absorbed my gaze. I knelt down before her, with one of my legs between hers. When my knee touched the straw, it made a popping sound as though it were on fire, and when it touched her legs, which were even whiter than the straw, her entire body began to tremble.

  She exclaimed, “Aijun … branch secretary … town mayor, I’m going to die, I’m going to die …”

  Her voice made me feel as though my blood were going to surge out of my veins, overflow the dam, and fly out of my body. I already felt as though the blood and salt in my fingers, toes, and palms might spurt out. Flustered and frantic, I opened her legs and placed my knee between them. Needless to say, another intoxicating and heartbreaking moment was about to arrive, when her pliable, vermilion screams would cover the sky like a rainbow, shining down on the earth and the mountains and stimulating my crazed revolutionary spirit and will. But just at that moment (Heaven, oh heaven! Earth, oh earth!), we heard footsteps, which came to a stop right behind us.

  (Roaring clouds, wind howling through the pines, the masses rush forward;

  The sound of gunfire, and the military situation becomes perilous,

  Everyone is shouldering an enormously heavy burden.

  A mountain-like storm darkens heaven and earth,

  a fire burns in my heart …)

  I spun around.

  Cheng Tianqing appeared on the side of the field.

  Although it was already spring, he was still wearing the black padded jacket that had been part of his uniform. His face wasn’t too dirty, and he looked at me and Hongmei with a gaze that was more white than black, with a green look of surprise on his face. I saw that things were not going well for him, and it was as if on the road to revolution we had been ambushed by the enemy. Just as I was turning my head, Hongmei sat up and grabbed her clothes.

  At that instant—an instant that felt as long as a ten-li mountain range—Cheng Tianqing stared at me, and I stared back at him. My mind was a complete blank. I didn’t know how to respond to this new development, nor did I have any inkling of what sort of earth-shattering events might follow. Cold vapor rose up from underneath my feet and swirled around my fingers and head, even as hot sweat dripped down from the tip of my nose. I thought I was about to collapse, and my bones felt as though they were made of rubber. At that moment, Cheng Tianqing suddenly lunged forward and knelt down before me and Hongmei and proceeded to kowtow as though he were pounding garlic with his forehead.

  He said, “Have mercy on me … Please have mercy on me. My daughter is dead, and you mustn’t kill me as well … I confess, I confess, OK? Given that I’m an old Party member who pa
rticipated in the revolution before Liberation, please have mercy on me just this once …”

  (This was truly a loss of face for the Party and for the older generation of revolutionaries!)

  I sighed and slowly began getting dressed. I told Hongmei, “Don’t be afraid.” Then I finished putting on my clothes, fastened my buttons, and calmly walked out from the space between the haystacks. I proceeded up to where Cheng Tianqing was kneeling, then stood over him like Mount Tai. I asked, “What did you see just now?”

  He said, “I’m at fault. I’ve let down Chairman Mao, and I’ve let down the Party Central Committee. I really didn’t mean to use paper from Chairman Mao’s book to wipe my grandson’s butt …” I raised my voice. “Father of Guizhi, I asked you what you saw.”

  He still didn’t look up, and instead pounded his forehead on the ground and said, “Spare me, please. Please spare me in light of my service as a mail courier for the Eighth Route Army before Liberation … I deserve to die a thousand times. I should die a thousand times …”

  As he said this, he eventually stopped kowtowing, and instead he knelt there and repeatedly slapped his own face.

  I said, “OK, I’ll spare you this time. Regardless of whether or not you and Guizhi may have been counterrevolutionaries, one day of matrimony nevertheless means endless devotion, and you are, for better or worse, Hongsheng’s and Honghua’s grandfather. So, I say you should simply return home.”

  He stopped slapping himself and instead looked up at me.

  I said, “Go! Go shoo away that sheep in the wheat field.”

  He kowtowed to me, then unsteadily got to his feet and walked away, heading toward the sheep in that distant field.

  After he left, I turned around to look at Hongmei, who had been standing behind me, and saw that her face was covered with a look of yellow terror like a window curtain.

  “If he utters a word about this, you and I are doomed.”

  I reflected for a moment, then turned to Cheng Tianqing, who was walking down a footpath through the field, and shouted, “Cheng Tianqing, if you didn’t see anything, we’ll let you live. If, however, you saw something and were to say anything about it, you would become an irredeemable counterrevolutionary, and I’m afraid that the revolution would not permit you to continue living on this earth.”

  I had assumed that he wouldn’t hear me, but he did. He came to a stop, turned around, and from a distance bowed and kowtowed toward me and Hongmei. Then he got to his feet and walked away.

  There were still some traces of winter chill in the early spring sunlight, and a breeze blew over from the hill and the irrigation canal. Cheng Tianqing had departed, but the lingering fear he left in his wake made us uninterested in continuing to do that thing. Instead, we sat on a millstone next to the wheat field, gazing out at the footpath, at the sheep that Cheng Tianqing had tried to shoo away, and at each field’s eastward-facing slogan-filled signs. Hongmei and I tightly held hands, and she said, “Aijun, we have to think of a solution—one that won’t affect our future or our revolutionary image and one that allows us to be together when we want. That way, if we want to do that thing, we can simply strip off our clothes like a married couple and do it.”

  I didn’t say anything. Instead, I turned away from that distant footpath and happened to glance at the area between the haystacks where Hongmei and I had been hiding. As I did so, a magnificent plan began to take shape in my mind.

  The clouds parted and the sun began to shine through, as the thousand-year sago palm burst into bloom. In my mind, there was a loud bang, followed by a deafening boom. In that instant, my enormous plan began to take shape and form, and to begin.

  3. Reflections on a Paulownia Tree

  I resolved to dig a secret tunnel from my house to Hongmei’s, so that we could meet up whenever we wanted and do that thing just like a married couple, without even needing to leave our homes.

  When this plan appeared to me like a ray of sunlight, my pulse began to race. However, I didn’t immediately share my plan with Hongmei. This might well prove to be the most beautiful page of our love life, but I didn’t want to say a word to her until I had completed my preparations. From the moment this plan first took shape in my mind, however, every time I thought of it I would become so excited that my blood would boil. I didn’t immediately implement the plan, however, but instead first made sure the production team meeting site was completely set up, and then wrote three experiential documents. One was titled “‘Three Unifications’ Turns the Thought of the Masses Red”; the second was titled “‘One Helping One’ Yields a Red Line, and ‘A Red Team’ Yields a Sheet of Red”; and the third was titled “Reflections on Whether Cheng Temple Is a Residual Feudal Poison or a Cultural Legacy.” All the attendees felt discomfited by Cheng Temple’s intricate ornamentation and noted that many of the temple’s tiles and bricks were engraved with imperial symbols of dragons and phoenixes. This quite clearly conflicted with the revolution’s call for destroying the old and establishing the new. I very much wanted to demolish Cheng Temple and the memorial arch, thereby allowing the storm of revolution to sweep through Chenggang. However, if I were in fact to carry out this sort of mass cleansing, not only would it be at odds with the status awarded to the temple in the early 1960s by the provincial regulations on the preservation of cultural relics, but more importantly it would be like chopping off the heads of all of the Cheng descendants, who account for three-quarters of the Chenggang production team. On this point, that bastard Mayor Wang was correct when he observed that I couldn’t afford to lose the support of the masses on account of Cheng Temple, since the People are the only force capable of creating history, and the masses are the only true heroes in the development of society. If we were to lose the support of the masses, we would lose the most basic condition for revolution. Was the Battle of the Cheng Brothers Memorial Arch not an instructive lesson? I hoped that before destroying Cheng Temple and the memorial arch, I would be able to receive an official document or an oral instruction from the higher-ups, which I could then use for support and protection as I proceeded to destroy the old. In “Reflections on Whether Cheng Temple Is a Residual Feudal Poison or a Cultural Legacy,” I listed nine charges relating to Cheng Temple and the memorial arch:

  The existence of Cheng Temple and the memorial arch suggests that the black flag of Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism is still fluttering amidst the red revolution, despite being in direct opposition to the revolutionary situation.

  The temple and memorial arch attract many pilgrims and poison the thought of people for miles around.

  y (such as people secretly lighting incense before and after Lunar New Year, and an endless stream of people making offerings).

  Every brick in the temple and the memorial arch reeks of the stench of feudal poison.

  …

  The act of destroying the temple and memorial arch is equivalent to destroying the headquarters of Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucianism, and doing so would therefore permit the great flag of Mao Zedong Thought to fly high over the Balou Mountains.

  I made several copies of this document and arranged for someone to take them to the county committee and send them to the district-level and provincial-level newspapers. In this way, the fields were fertilized and irrigated, and once the revolution reached the next stage, I would be able to begin implementing my glorious plan to destroy Cheng Temple.

  One day when Hongsheng was at school and Honghua was out with my mother, I climbed a paulownia tree in our family’s courtyard and, using the basic knowledge about tunnel-digging I had acquired while serving in the military, I peered through the tree leaves and surveyed the area. Using an elm tree behind Shi Dagou’s house as my first benchmark, the toon tree behind Cheng Cuifen’s house as my second benchmark, and the old pagoda tree in the entrance to Cheng Tianqing’s house as my third benchmark, I estimated that it was approximately 550 meters from my house on Rear Cheng Street to Hongmei’s house on Front Cheng Street. But between the two houses there wa
s a corner of Cheng Temple courtyard and the houses belonging to Shi Ergou, deputy director of the second production team, and seven people surnamed Cheng, together with parts of Center Cheng Street and Rear Cheng Street. If the tunnel was a half meter wide and one meter high, it would generate 275 cubic meters of packed earth, and assuming that the ratio of packed earth to loose earth was at least 1 to 1.5, that would make 415 cubic meters of loose earth. Moreover, if halfway down the passageway, beneath Center Cheng Street, I were to excavate an area large enough to hold a bed—about 3 meters wide, 3 meters long, and 2 meters high—this underground room, which would serve as our nuptial chamber, would generate 18 cubic meters of packed earth, or 27 cubic meters of loose earth. Accordingly, if the tunnel were perfectly straight, it would generate some 300 cubic meters of packed earth, or 450 cubic meters of loose earth. If I were to pursue revolution during the day and engage in production (which is to say, digging the tunnel) at night, then, assuming I could dig 0.7 cubic meters of packed earth every night, it would take me 420 days to dig this tunnel of love. Four hundred and twenty days is nearly a year and a half. But what if I needed to leave home to attend a meeting? Or what if I needed to work overtime at night in Chenggang (whether during the peak agriculture season in midsummer, or to organize political study groups for Party members or production team members)? Or what if I were to fall ill with a fever? Or what if there was an error in my calculations, and the tunnel didn’t reach its destination on my first try?

  That is to say, even if I were to dig as quickly as possible—working every night without fail—it would in all likelihood take me nearly two years to complete the tunnel. (And during these two years, I would need to attain another objective, which was to become mayor). Two years might seem like a very long time—like an interminable night during which the sun never appears. But for a revolutionary head over heels in love, what does this amount to? Didn’t the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression last eight years? Didn’t the War of Liberation last four years? Didn’t I serve in the army for four years and spend a year and eight months digging a tunnel through the mountains? However, I never lost my will to succeed, and there was no obstacle I couldn’t overcome. Who said this? Is this a slogan I wrote while serving on the production team, or is it some beautiful words I read in a report?