Shaogong, han - A Dictionary of Maqiao.html

by A Dictionary of Maqiao (lit)

  Three Ears bit his lip and said no more. No matter how much Benyi swore at him, his expression remained determinedly calm and even vaguely supercilious, watching the Party Secretary perform, as if he had some well-planned strategy all thought out. He waited urbanely while the Secretary finished swearing, then turned his head and walked off with a melancholy air.

  He walked to the mouth of the village, quietly watched two kids playing with ants, then went back to where he lived. He'd work all his shifts as arranged-he wasn't about to be thrown off balance by Benyi.

  He went looking for Uncle Luo, Fucha, and Precious Huang too, he even went looking for the Commune Head. In the end, he actually ran all the way into the county seat to inquire where Long Stick Xi had been sent for labor reform, because he strongly suspected he was in fact the seed of Long Stick Xi and wanted to see for himself what Long Stick Xi looked like before he dragged him off for a blood test. If Long Stick Xi was his natural father but wouldn't recognize him as his son, he'd smash his own brains out in front of him. He'd asked for nothing all his life, just this, all he wanted was to unravel the riddle of his own birth, to pay his respects to his real father, never mind if it was only for a day-just one moment would be enough.

  Twice he went into the county seat, without managing to find Long Stick Xi either time. He didn't lose heart. He knew this wasn't a simple matter; perhaps it would be his life's destiny, but he was fully prepared in any case. He wasn't like the other Daoist Immortals, lying around all day sleeping, or wandering the mountains, or enjoying the waters. He was busy every day until late, busy searching and surveying, and-while he was at it-busy with all the interminable things in the world that make you busy. He was lazy by nature, but not outwardly: he often went off to the supply and marketing cooperative, the clinic, the granary, the forestry station, the school, as if he went to work there every day. He helped the quack pound the medicine, helped the butcher blow out the pig's bladder, helped the teacher carry water, helped the granary kitchen grind bean curd. He'd help out a friend on any important matter. Because his family's class status was too high, Maqiao's Yanwu was sent back home from school in Changle and refused entrance to the commune middle school. Determined to campaign on behalf of this victim of injustice, an indignant Three Ears dragged him, huffing and puffing, to the middle school, donated his entire collection of cigarettes to the headmaster, and asked the man to give him some face, to take in Yanwu.

  The headmaster said it wasn't that he didn't want to take him, the problem was he'd been expelled from the county middle school and- how should he put it-there were political… problems.

  Without a word, Three Ears rolled up a sleeve, took out a sickle, and drew it across his bare flesh; a stripe of blood immediately swelled out.

  The headmaster gaped.

  "Will you take him?"

  "You-you-you threatening me?"

  With another horizontal cut, another wound split open.

  Both Yanwu and the headmaster blanched and rushed at him to grab the knife. The three of them became one great wrestling mass, the clothes of each spattered with blood, even part of the headmaster's mosquito net was stained red. Three Ears held the knife aloft and rasped: "You decide, Headmaster Tang: d'you want to see me die?"

  "Calm, please calm down," the head-teacher begged him through his sobs. He ran out to find another two teachers, and following a brief discussion Yanwu was asked there and then to complete the formalities for entering the school.

  Three Ears' arms were covered all over in knife wounds, but he also had a lot of friends. One thing about him, though, was that he'd never return to work in Maqiao. He'd rather shed blood elsewhere than shed one drop of sweat back in Maqiao. He wore an old army uniform he'd gotten hold of from somewhere or other, to make him look a bit more dignified. He said he was busy selling his blood, and when he'd gotten enough money for his blood, he'd go to the county seat to buy some bits and pieces, some leather belts and electric wires, some screwdrivers and spanners, then he'd make a mountain drill and open a copper mine on Tianzi Peak. His copper mine would make the people of Maqiao rich, and afterwards they wouldn't have to work in the fields any more, they wouldn't plant grain, cotton, sweet potatoes any more, they'd just eat and enjoy themselves every day.

  No one expected that ugly little runt Three Ears would ever dare shit on Benyi's doorstep, would stir up all the trouble that was to come. That day, returning to Maqiao from the construction site at Bajingdong Reservoir, and wielding a Japanese-made 38-gauge rifle, Benyi forced Three Ears, tied up like a turkey, onto the grain-drying terrace. In his blinding rage, Benyi was making just about enough of a racket to frighten all the chickens and dogs out of the village: tired of living, was he, the smart-ass bastard? Must've been, to think of raping someone from the Party Secretary's family. If it hadn't been for Party policy on prisoners of war,. he'd have cut off his dragon by now, wham, bam, gone. He hadn't been afraid of American imperialism in the Korean War, so was a lazybones like Three Ears going to scare him?

  While he was saying his piece, people noticed that blood was coming out of Three Ears' nose, his clothes were torn to pieces, he had nothing but a pair of shorts on his lower body and his legs were black and blue. He'd lost the strength to keep his head up and it slumped weakly to one side; neither was he strong enough to talk and his eyes had shrunk to slits of greyish-white.

  "Has he had it?" People were terrified by the very sight of him.

  "Be good if he died, one less bastard for socialism to deal with!" Benyi said rather ungraciously.

  "How could he do something like that?"

  "He'd stab his own father with a rake, is there anything he'd stop at?"

  He yelled at Zhongqi to give him a hand hanging him up on a tree, then scooped up a great dipper of dung and held it up over his head. "D'you admit you're guilty? Speak up, d'you admit it?"

  Three Ears shot a glance across at Benyi, blew a blood bubble out of his nostril; remained silent.

  The dipperful of dung tipped over.

  Tiexiang was nowhere to be seen. Some said she'd fainted from fright some time ago, some said she was hiding inside the house crying, repeating over and over he shouldn't be let off the rape charge, how her thighs and waist had been almost broken, spelling everything out very clearly. The men on the terrace put their heads together and whispered, once more drawn into concern over her body. Given that she hadn't attracted attention like this for some time, then, you could say, Three Ears was now doing this job for her again. Was she anxious her body had faded from people's memories?

  It was already late at night by the time anyone released Three Ears down from the tree. He limped along, using walls or trees for support, and in the end it took him a full two hours, gasping and panting as he went, to walk a tiny stretch of road, stopping to rest all the time, his body aching from head to toe. Every step was an effort, as the most serious wound was between his legs; his "dragon bag" (scrotum) had been cut to pieces, one testicle had almost fallen off and it all hurt so much he could hardly see straight. But he didn't dare go to the clinic, afraid he'd be spotted there by people he knew, afraid it would feed the gossips, that people would kick up a huge fuss. Neither did he want to go back home: his mother would take him in, but he didn't want to go asking for more trouble from that damned Zhaoqing. He had no choice but to go back to the House of the Immortals, ask his housemate Ma Ming to help him find a needle and thread, and crouch round an oil lamp making a few crude stitches in his dragon bag. By the last stitch, the space between his legs was smeared with blood and his own hand shook so much he couldn't hold the needle steady; his whole body bathed in sweat, he fainted before he could gather up the thread.

  All night long, the village dogs howled.

  When Ma Ming woke, there wasn't a trace of Three Ears in his grass nest.

  Nothing was seen of him for months on end.

  One day in early autumn, some of the women were turning creepers on the sweet-potato patch when one of them cried out; sen
sing there was something there, everyone turned to discover someone standing on the road, two great big eyes staring out from under a mane of long hair. Someone finally made out that it was Three Ears, his face livid with rage. No one knew where he'd sprung from, nor how long he'd been standing there, staring silently.

  The mane of hair walked over, a bag on his back, right up to Tiexiang.

  Tiexiang took several steps backwards.

  Thump-before anyone had seen what was happening, a wood knife was thrown at Tiexiang's feet and the mane knelt before her, neck stretched out as far as it could: "Kill me!"

  Tiexiang shouted at the other women, "Help, someone! Help!"

  "Are you going to kill me or not?"

  Tiexiang went ashen, turned, and ran.

  "Don't move!" Three Ears shouted at the top of his lungs; Tiexiang swayed briefly but didn't dare move any farther. He stood up, a thin, cold smile protruding sharply out of his face, "Lady, if you don't kill me, how're you going to have any peace? You poured a bowl of shit over my head, did you reckon I could swallow that?" Before Tiexiang could grasp what was going on, he suddenly pulled out a thick vine whip from his waist, and- crack-dealt Tiexiang a blow which left her staggering-another crack- she fell to the ground. She screeched and lifted her arms to ward off the blows, but when the women standing near saw how terrible the expression on Three Ears' face was, none dared intervene and all they could do was hurry back to the village to report as quick as they could.

  "You filthy woman, you filthy whore, if you don't kill me, how's this thing going to end?…" Three Ears swore then whipped, swore then whipped until she rolled and writhed around everywhere. An observer looking on from afar would have seen and heard nothing, no one, nothing but grey, foggy waves of dust and sand, a pile of green potato leaves rolling here, turning there, making a rustling sound, a few shredded leaves flying up now and then. In the end, when her cries weakened and the leaves stopped moving, Three Ears finally stopped and dropped the whip.

  He opened the cloth bag he'd brought with him, took out a new pair of leather shoes and a new pair of plastic sandals, and dropped them in the pile of now motionless potato leaves. "I'm still aching for you, you've seen that now!"

  Then he stalked off.

  At the intersection, he turned and shouted at the women: "Tell that piece of trash Benyi that I, Ma Xingli, stuck his wife twenty-five times, stuck her till she screamed-"

  The people of Maqiao had almost forgotten he was called Ma Xingli.

  *Nailed Backs

  : Benyi's first thought was to seize Three Ears, right there and then. When he returned from the construction site and heard the news from Zhongqi that his wife had had an affair with Three Ears, he was overcome with a murderous rage. But in the end the little bit of brain he had left made it clear to him this was a major loss of face; what would it achieve to kick up a huge fuss putting Three Ears on display? Thinking it over, then over again, the only thing to do was lock the door and thrash his wife to pieces. He broke a clothes-washing pestle on his adulterous wife, who rolled all over the floor under his blows until she tremblingly admitted everything. She still had a bit of fight left in her, though, and went along with Benyi's plan of dragging Three Ears into the melee. While the two men were slugging it out, it looked like Benyi was getting the worst of it, and he yelled at his wife to come and help out. Her loyalty was still with her old man, and an inspired lunge mid-fracas at Three Ears' crotch area almost knocked him out cold. With this, Benyi finally got his hands free, fetched the hemp rope he'd prepared long in advance, and tied Three Ears up as tightly as a zongzi- a glutinous rice dumpling wrapped in bamboo leaves.

  But Benyi had never imagined that his adulterous wife would suddenly disappear the following year. Three Ears didn't cross his mind once: even if she'd eloped or been abducted, only the director of the Cultural Institute or the photographer came under suspicion. He thought he'd lost a simply inhuman amount of face and completely ignored public business for days on end, locked and bolted the door, stuck two plasters on his forehead, and slept right through. Murderous gall rose deep inside him again: Party Secretary or no, wherever he next found that devil woman, he'd finish her off with one knife-stroke.

  Most of the villagers hadn't considered Three Ears either, would never have imagined that a woman as attractive as Tiexiang would abandon two kids still in school and go off with a lazybones like him. People merely supposed something was going on in the Cultural Institute, and even sent someone to the county seat to make inquiries.

  The following autumn, a piece of very surprising news came over from Jiangxi. This news proved that Tiexiang had in fact eloped and that she'd robbed a grain truck on the highway with Three Ears; out of the bandits hunted down by the army and the People's Militia, one had been beaten to death and ten or so arrested. The final two had been tough nuts to crack, evading arrest by hiding here and there in the mountains. Afterwards, making use of information provided by a local peasant, the People's Militia searching the mountains finally pinned them down and forced them into a mountain cave. The militia encircled the mouth of the cave several times over and shouted out: having got no response, they finally hurled in a hand grenade and blew them to smithereens. The militia discovered afterwards that the two dead were a man and a woman, so thin they only weighed seventy or eighty catties each. The woman's stomach stuck out, several months into pregnancy. An official seal was discovered among their clothing and bags for starting a coppermining cooperative, or something of the sort. There were also two blank prescription letters, two sheets of special lesson preparation paper, and a few envelopes for official letters on which were written the name of this county and this commune. It was only thanks to this that Public Security contacted the area to send someone to identify them. Commune Head He went and identified, from the photographs left at the police substation, the blurred mass of flesh and blood that had been the faces of Tiexiang and Three Ears.

  Commune Head He paid two of the local peasants twenty yuan to bury them.

  According to Maqiao's ancient rules, as Tiexiang was unchaste and Three Ears was unrighteous, as both had contravened family rules and national law and been disloyal, in death they had to have "nailed backs." In other words, after their deaths, they had to face downward in their graves and nine nails had to be hammered into their backs. Facing downwards meant they had no face to look other people in the face. Nailing their backs meant they would be forever locked in the netherworld, that they could never again be reincarnated or reborn to bring further disaster upon others.

  As Maqiao people hadn't taken charge of their corpses, they couldn't nail their backs. When they mentioned this, the old people in Maqiao couldn't conceal their great sense of anxiety at not knowing what further trouble from them might lie in store.

  *Root

  : Three Ears' elopement with Tiexiang aroused a sense of moral outrage in Maqiao. In the past, it'd always been the women, particularly the women, who'd carped at Tiexiang behind her back, who'd poked their noses into her relations with the director of the Cultural Institute, with the young lad from the photography institute, who'd flared their nostrils and pursed their lips as her backside sashayed back and forth. Now, they suddenly felt these relationships were perfectly acceptable, could be overlooked. They even thought there was nothing much wrong in stealing someone-the important thing was, who stole whom. Although none of Tiexiang's affairs had been quite proper, this affair with Three Ears was definitely the worst thing she ever did. On this point, a great sense of injustice, a kind of protective group feeling suddenly welled up on behalf of Tiexiang, it agitated, moved, warmed them, as if Tiexiang was an athlete they'd entered for a competition, who'd lost the day at some sports meet due to some chance misfortune. It made them hopping mad. And Three Ears was just too undignified, simply beneath contempt, he'd never even washed his neck properly. Although he'd behaved properly toward his fellow villagers, he had no moral character to speak of, no family fortune, no decent education, no not
hing, even his parents were the sort of people who'd end up lugging carrying poles all their lives; it was a joke, how could Tiexiang go off with him? And-as it turned out-get pregnant by him? For a few months, they took this as a collective insult.

  However much they thought it over, they couldn't figure Tiexiang out.

  Only one thing could explain it: fate. In Maqiao dialect, people didn't much use the word "fate"; more often they'd use the word "root," as if they were comparing themselves to plants. They also read lines on the hand and on the foot, believing these marks were the precise embodiment of fate, the very image of roots. An old man passing by once read the roots on Tiexiang's hand: he said with a sigh that she was a threshold root, her ancestors had been beggars perhaps, had hung around the doorways of a thousand houses. This root was so long it hadn't been broken in her.

  Tiexiang had giggled away disbelievingly. True enough, her father Dai Shiqing had been a beggar chief, but she'd married a Party Secretary, and the spouse of a Party Secretary was practically the Party Secretary- what doorway was she going to be found hanging around? Little did she realize that, all those years later, the words of that old man would turn out to be her fate when she followed Three Ears, a man so poor he had no choice but to hang around doorways, that she'd end her life wandering around destitute in distant parts. She was like a tree, desperately seeking sunlight and rainwater from up above, but after a thirty-year search, she discovered finally that no matter how much her own leaves grew, they couldn't escape their roots, couldn't flutter off into the sky.

  Her palm was crossed with low-lying roots.

  The phrase "return to your roots"-also related to the word "root"- signified not a wandering elder returning home, but "fatalism." This was how they put it: as mud is three inches deep, so man has three branches. During youth, everything remains in flux, but after completing the three branches of age-three dozen years, that is-people start to return to their roots, whether they're noble or base, wise or stupid, good or bad, all becomes clear after the age of thirty-six. Que sera and each to his own. It was during the very year of her thirty-sixth birthday that Tiexiang-as if possessed by the spirits-went off with a lazybones; this was her inescapable, inexorable doom. Or so they deeply, unshakably believed.