Shaogong, han - A Dictionary of Maqiao.html

by A Dictionary of Maqiao (lit)

  "What kind of logic is that? Old Dribbler belongs to the team leader too, and his old lady too, so everyone can sleep with her, can they?"

  Everyone snickered quietly to themselves.

  This got Benyi so angry he couldn't speak, and his jaw hung out of place till he pulled it back in again. "Fine, you smash away! Give it a good smash! I won't just dock all your work points, I'll punish you till you howl! I won't give you another chance, you'll know that nails are made of iron and eggs are eggs when I'm through with you!"

  When they heard they'd be punished, the situation started to turn; the expression on several people's faces changed and they came forward to tug at, to intervene with, Zhihuang. Some stuffed cigarettes into his hand.

  "What's the point? Calm down a bit, calm down."

  "Don't ruin things for other people."

  "Let them cut our work points, but why pull the thing down?"

  "Part of this wall's mine too: why should it be smashed just because you say so?…"

  Zhihuang was quite a bruiser, and one shake of his shoulders to the left, then to the right, threw the people on both sides off. "Don't worry, I only want my stones, I won't lay a finger on any of yours."

  This was, in fact, nonsense. The stones he'd laid today were all at the base of the wall. If he pulled out the bottom, could the wall above hang in thin air?

  Benyi threw up his hands and walked off into the distance. But Zhaoqing, who'd tailed him all the way, quickly ran back, his face covered in smiles, saying that Benyi had changed his mind, that not one of the work points would be cut-or not for the time being, that he'd settle accounts later on. At this the tension finally, simultaneously vanished from everyone's faces. Seeing that Precious Huang's hammer had stopped, everyone piled in to stuff back into place the rocks he'd just smashed out.

  On the way back to the village, a lot of people fought for the privilege of helping Zhihuang carry the tool basket: if Precious Huang hadn't been around today, they said, wouldn't everyone have been done over good and proper by Old Dribbler? Wouldn't they have been dead meat on the chopping block? They thronged Zhihuang on all sides to sing his praises, Precious Huang this, Precious Huang that, on and on it went. In my opinion, the word "precious" here was now no longer derogatory but had recovered its original meaning: something to be treasured.

  *Lion Dance

  : Zhihuang had been the hand-drummer in the old opera troupe, the head drummer in other words. He drummed beats like "Phoenix Nodding," "Dragon Gate Leaping," "Ten Vows Redeemed" and "Lion Dance," whirlwind blasts that made the blood surge, the spirit soar, a string of terrifying thunderbolts that fell like axe-blows. There were a lot of bar breaks and dotted notes, all kinds of dangerous and unexpected sudden halts. It stopped and started, died away then picked itself up, snatched itself back from the jaws of death, dramatically recovered from the brink of collapse. If it pulverized your every bone, dislocated your every muscle, made your sight run to your nose and your sense of smell run to your ears, smashed up every part of your brain- then it had to be Zhihuang's "Lion Dance." You needed a full half hour to beat a set of "Lion Dance." Many drums were smashed under this lion's thunderous feet-Zhihuang's rock-chiseling hands were too heavy.

  A lot of the lads in the village wanted to learn from him, but no one mastered his art.

  He very nearly got to drum in our Mao Zedong Thought arts propaganda team. He accepted the invitation with great excitement and set about fixing up oil lamps, making gong hammers, writing Propaganda Team System, or something like that, on red paper in higgledy-piggledy characters, throwing himself into absolutely everything. He smiled at everyone: because he was too thin, when he smiled all that remained of his lower face were two rows of bright, clean, snow-white teeth. But he only drummed for a day, then never came back; the next day he went back to the mountain to break rocks. Fucha went to call him back, even promised to give him twice as many work points as the others, but he wouldn't budge.

  The main reason, apparently, was he felt the new operas were dull, they had no scope to give free play to his percussion. Spoken poems, short songs, the bumper harvest dance-none of these needed the added excitement of a Lion. When a scene from a Model Opera-The New Fourth Army Convalescing in the Homes of the People-came along, his lion finally showed its muzzle, only to be slain by one wave of the director's hand.

  "I haven't finished!" he yelled in outrage.

  "How can people sing when all we can hear is you drumming?" The director was from the County Cultural Institute. "This opera's for strings and wind, when it finishes just tack on a finale and that'll do."

  Zhihuang's face darkened, but all he could do was keep waiting.

  When the Japanese devils had come on and the scene had livened up, was Zhihuang allowed to play a good hand? The director, it turned out, was even worse than he'd thought, and only allowed him to beat some running water sounds and bang a few small gongs at the end. He didn't get it, so the director grabbed the hammer and banged it a couple of times to show him, "just like that, got it?"

  "What tune is it?"

  "Tune?"

  "There's no tune for the percussion?"

  "No tune."

  "So, just let it out any old how, like a kid having a crap?"

  "The problem with you, you know, is you only know the old stuff, it's always Lion Dance this, Lion Dance that. What lion's dancing when the Jap devils come on, eh?"

  Zhihuang had nothing to say to this and had to take what he was given. After one whole day of rehearsal, after drumming odds and ends with no pattern or order, he had no choice but to resign in massive disappointment. He had total contempt for the director and refused to believe there were any good operas in the world apart from Bi Rengui, Yang Silang, Cheng Yaojin, Zhang Fei, and the like; in fact he found it very hard to believe there was all that much else full stop in the world that could impress him. If you told him about special effects in opera films, how many people the world's biggest steamer could seat, how if you always walk forward you'll return to your starting place because the earth is round, how in gravity-less space a child's finger could lift 108,000 catties, and so on and on, he'd summarize his opinion of it all in four utterly cold, indifferent words:

  "You're putting me on."

  He wouldn't argue, or get angry, sometimes he'd even give a thin little smile; but he'd lick his lips and summarize, always, with perfect confidence: "You're putting me on."

  Normally, he'd be really quite civil to us transferred youth, and had some respect for knowledge. He wasn't uncurious or unquestioning, quite the opposite: whenever there was an opportunity, he liked to approach those of us who'd been to middle school and ask questions he'd never been able to think of an answer to. It was just that he had his doubts about anything new-including Marxist writings-and was too quick to judge our answers, too absolute, he'd always be denying things without leaving any room for discussion.

  "You're putting me on again."

  For example, he'd seen films but categorically refused to believe that the kung-fu in revolutionary model operas was rehearsed. "Rehearsed? What rehearsal? These people've been having the bones knocked out of them since they were children, there's only flesh left in 'em; they get the living daylights thrashed out of them onstage, offstage they can't even pick up an empty water bucket."

  At times like these, persuading him, convincing him the bones of those kung-fu fighters were still in place, that carrying water would be absolutely no problem at all, was harder than flying to the moon.

  *Boss Hong

  After stopping work one day, I spotted by the side of the road a small calf, too young to have grown horns, its furry muzzle round and well-formed, snuffling down under the mulberry tree eating grass. I felt like giving its tail a tug and had just extended a hand when, as if it had grown eyes in the back of its head, it slipped away, head tilted to one side. I was just about to go after it when a moo sounded out from a flatland in the distance and a big, glaring ox pointed its horns at me and char
ged ferociously, leaving the ground and mountains trembling in its wake; I dropped my hoe in terror and ran.

  It was only some time later that, still with lingering fear, I came to retrieve my hoe.

  While retrieving the hoe, I tried to ingratiate myself with the calf by feeding it some grass, but just as I'd waved the blades of grass near its mouth, the ox in the distance charged at me again, mooing like a banshee, with maddening obtuseness, intolerant of treatment either good or bad.

  The big ox's desperate fierceness toward me meant it must be the calf's mother. It was only later that I found out this animal was called "Boss Hong": because it had been born with a bit of its ear missing, people identified it as the reincarnation of someone who'd come from near Luo River. This person, Boss Hong, had been a great bully with seven or eight wives and had also had a bit of his left ear missing. People said he'd done so many bad things that Heaven had condemned him to a lifetime as an ox, pulling ploughs, drawing harrows and being whipped to atone for the sins of his previous life.

  People also said that Heaven must really have eyes in its head to have sent Boss Hong to be reborn in Maqiao. The year the Red Army came to incite the peasants to attack local bullies, Maqiao people hadn't dared make a move at first; but when they saw a tyrant in Longjia Sands had been brought down, had had his head cracked open, and that nothing had come of it, they itched to have a go themselves. Unfortunately, by the time they'd got the peasants' association together, drunk the chicken's blood wine and made a red flag, they discovered their moment had already passed: all the certified bullies in the vicinity had already been struck down and all the granaries emptied, bar a few rats. None too happy about this, they made a few inquiries back and forth before finally heading across the Luo River, spears and blunderbusses in hand, to make revolution in Boss Hong's village. Little did they expect that the peasants there would also be making revolution: Boss Hong was their bully, they said, only they could revolutionize him, not people from other villages, and the Hong family's grain could only be divided between them, not between people from other villages. You don't go watering other people's fields, do you, now? The peasants' associations of the two villages negotiated without reaching any agreement and in the end it came to blows. The people from around Maqiao (not just Maqiao itself) thought the people from over the way were protecting the bully, that they were a fake peasants' association, making fake revolution, and built a pine tree cannon to bomb the village. The people from over the way showed no signs of weakening either: banging an almighty racket out of their gongs, they took down the wooden doors of the whole village, moved a few threshing windmills, and blocked the road that led into the village. They also fired at will, until the leaves hidden deep in the forest trembled and fell to the ground in a tattered flurry.

  Two men from round Maqiao were injured and a good bronze gong was lost in the struggle, the whole squadron of men and horses was swimming in sweat and grime and no one had had anything to eat all day. Unable to believe that the revolutionary consciousness of their peasant brothers over the way could be so low, they gave it some thought and seized on the idea that it was all down to Boss Hong's plotting. And this was how their deep feelings of animosity and hatred toward Boss Hong were sealed.

  Now they were perfectly satisfied, with everything fair and just: Grandfather Heaven had sent Boss Hong to shoulder the plough for Maqiao, to be used to death in Maqiao-this settled the debt. One summer, after the higher-ups had transferred some of the oxen to plough the tea fields, only two were left in Maqiao. After having ploughed the last paddy of late summer rice, a panting and wheezing Boss Hong lay down to sleep in the mud, never to clamber up again. When it was sent to the slaughterhouse, it was discovered its lungs had completely filled up with blood, that almost every bubble in its lungs had burst; they lay abandoned in a wooden basin, like a pile of blood-dyed melon pulp.

  *Three-Hairs

  : There's another ox I want to talk about. This ox was called "Three-Hairs," a fearsome character over whom, in all Maqiao, only "Precious" Zhihuang had any jurisdiction. People said it hadn't been born of a heifer, it had burst out of a stone like Monkey Sun in Journey to the West. It wasn't in fact an ox at all, it was a stone come to life. As Precious Huang was a stonemason, of course it followed very naturally that he should look after this lump of stone. This line of reasoning was universally accepted by all.

  Cited in connection with this line of reasoning was the fact that the cry Zhihuang used for calling oxen was quite different from everyone else's. When most people wanted to catch oxen, they all went "chuh-chuh-chuh"; only Zhihuang used "slippy-slip slip" to catch Three-Hairs. "Slip" was a word often used by the stonemason. "Slip the son of heaven" meant hit with the iron hammer; therefore, all stones must, will fear getting the "slip." If Three-Hairs got into a fight with other oxen, however hard people tried to calm things down, the usual methods would never persuade Three-Hairs to let things lie. Only after hearing Zhihuang shout "slip" would it leave off, head hanging, panicked, and meek as a bale of cotton.

  As I recall, Zhihuang's ox-handling skills were excellent: his whip never touched the ox's body and even after a day of ploughing the fields, he'd be clean as a whistle, not a speck of mud on him; he'd look just like he was returning, immaculately dressed, from a visit to some relatives, not like he was coming from the fields. In the fields that he'd ploughed, the churned black mud was like page after page of a book, lying smooth, glossy, flawless, elegant, neat, and even, amidst the rising currents of warm air; they exuded an air of natural smoothness that was both perfectly controlled and relaxed, in possession of both spirit and form, that made you feel you couldn't bear to touch or destroy it. If you looked at them closely, you'd discover his furrows had hardly any botched lines: regardless of how irregular the shape of the paddy field, how difficult it was for the ploughman to place the furrow, he still proceeded without skipping over ridges, very rarely intersecting or repeating a furrow; his were the sparing brushstrokes of a grand master, with never a drop of paint wasted. Once, I noticed he'd ploughed the final circuit with a tiny dead end remaining before him which, from the looks of it, would have to be abandoned with regret. Suddenly, to my total astonishment, he leapt with a great cry into action, seizing the plough, tilting it to one side, and in the blink of an eye the dead end was neatly turned over.

  Unbelievable.

  I would swear that dead end hadn't been turned over by a plough. I can only believe he possessed some kind of magic power, a kind of invisible force that he'd spread, via his palms, through the whole iron plough till it burst out of the snow-bright plough tip, springing, leaping, scattering deep into the mud. At any given moment, any distant dead end he wanted to turn over-in the places his strength reached but his plough couldn't, his energy reached but his strength couldn't, his intent reached but his energy couldn't-would turn itself over.

  As I recall, he didn't have much confidence in the ox-herders and their little tricks, and always wanted to let the oxen out himself, taking them far, far away in search of clean water and grass that would suit their palates; he'd only take care of himself after he'd settled the oxen. For this reason, he was often the last to get off work, a lonely black spot on the mountainside, sometimes moving, sometimes still against the blazing reddish-purple backdrop of the sky, as the sound of cowbells merged in and out of the silence, scattered in amongst the fiery clouds that soared through the sky. It was about this time that star after isolated star would be coming awake.

  Maqiao would have been unimaginable, dusk would have been unimaginable without the sound of oxbells. Dusk without these muted bells was like a river without flowing water, a spring without flowers, would have left only a magnificent wasteland.

  The ox at his side was always Three-Hairs.

  The problem was that sometimes Zhihuang had to go to the quarry-particularly after autumn, when things got pretty busy there. After he'd left, no one dared use Three-Hairs. One time, though, I decided to try my luck at copying Zhihua
ng's way of "slipping" it. It was spattering rain that day, with lightning lashing the dark recesses of cloud layers; two bare metal broadcasting wires shaking in the wind had been struck by lightning and were spitting out great rounds of shooting stars. The naked wires strewed themselves across the patch of field I'd just been ploughing, over where I had to pass whenever I returned, my nerves jangling away as I did so. Every time I approached underneath, my legs would turn to jelly, time and again I'd hold my breath, twisting my neck upwards to keep watch, watching my fate rocking and swaying back and forth on a thread in the sky, spluttering handful upon handful of sparks, as I dreaded an earth-shattering blow hitting me smack on the head.

  Seeing that other people were still braving the rain to plant seedlings out in the fields, I felt embarrassed at going inside without permission, felt that it'd look like I was running scared of death.

  Three-Hairs seized this opportunity to have some fun with me. The farther away we were from the live electric wires, the more the animal tripped and gamboled, the more unresponsive and unstoppable it became, however hard I pulled. The nearer we got to being beneath the electric wires, the slower it went, either to crap or to pee, or to nibble the grass at the side of the field, as if greatly enjoying my discomfort. In the end, it stopped moving altogether, completely oblivious to how you "slipped," to how you cracked the whip-even if you pushed its behind forward. Its body leaned, slanted forward, but its four hooves had set down roots into the ground.

  It just so happened to halt right under the electric wire. Sparks were still spluttering out in all directions, crackling, exploding, splitting, a string of them dancing along the electric wire, sounding off into the distance. My willow whip had been beaten to a straggle, breaking ever shorter at every crack. Then Three-Hairs suddenly, unexpectedly produced a great roar, yanked the ploughshare so that it shot out of the mud in a silver streak, and galloped crazily toward the cliffside. A tumult of terrified exclamations resounded somewhere off in the distance as the wrenching motion left me staggering, almost toppled over into the mud. The plough handle flew out of my hands, the pointed ploughshare swung forward and, like the merciless falling of an axe, stuck itself straight into one of Three-Hairs' back legs. Perhaps not yet feeling the pain, it leapt onto a mound of earth a good meter high and swayed briefly, dislodging great lumps of mud that collapsed with a crash; it didn't fall back off in the end, but the ploughshare behind it lodged, with a violent clunk, into a seam of rock.