Shaogong, han - A Dictionary of Maqiao.html

by A Dictionary of Maqiao (lit)

  I also noticed that she'd begun to take care to avoid collisions, that the sounds of her panting were often a long way from where I was. But every time we got off work, she'd quietly pick up clothes I'd forgotten in the cave and stuff them into my hands at an appropriate moment. When eating, she'd add two or three sweet potatoes to my bowl, while her bowl remained almost empty. And finally, as I was kneeling on the ground, sweating away, every tendon straining, I'd feel a billow of coolness on my back-a towel would mop my glistening spine.

  "Leave it…" The sweat had got up my nose, stopped me finishing my sentence.

  The towel lightly mopped my face.

  "I don't need…"

  I ducked my face away, tried to block the towel. But in the darkness, my hand wouldn't follow orders and missed the towel, ended up grabbing- after a couple of fumbles mid-air-a hand. It was only a long time after the event itself that I remembered this hand was small and soft. No, I should correct that: memories like this are imaginings, conjectures after the event. In reality, when you reach the point when physical strength is totally used up, the point when your panting is overdrawn on future panting, gender no longer exists. Chance touches are not only no longer startling: you lose all sense of touch whatsoever. Grabbing a woman's hand becomes no different from grabbing a handful of mud. Staggering, swaying, I might have brushed against her shoulder, might even have stroked her back, there might have been other might-have-beens, and others besides, but I've no memory left of this, no solid proof.

  I believe that, at this moment, she too had lost her sense of touch, of shyness and reserve, that all emotional abstraction had been puffed and panted out. This is the first and only time in my life so far that I've experienced de-gendering like this.

  Afterwards, as I gradually recovered my energy, she recovered her gender and retreated far, far away.

  Later still, she got married. Her parents valued sons over daughters and only let her finish primary school before sending her out to earn work points in the village; once they'd found a family that could afford to eat white rice they sent her packing. The day she was sent off to be married, dressed in a new pink jacket and a pair of fairly up-to-the-minute white tennis shoes, she stood there, thronged by a crowd of twittering girls. I don't know why, but she never cast a glance at me. She would certainly have heard my voice, certainly have known I was there, but for some unknown reason, she'd talk to anybody, meet anybody's eyes-but never took a glance at me. There was nothing between her and me, nothing secret. Apart from that time digging in the cave, there'd been no other contact between us to mention. There was nothing special to be said, beyond my later imaginings and conjectures that I'd felt that hand of hers, beyond her having had the opportunity to witness my greatest sufferings. No other woman in the world would ever be so close to me in the state I'd been in then, would see me lying there like a dog, dressed in a pair of shorts and nothing else, sometimes kneeling, sometimes on my side, my whole body bathed in mud and sweat, struggling, panting underground in a darkness utterly bereft of daylight, with only the eyes in my head to prove I was human, covered with dust and smoke particles snorted around my nostrils. She'd seen a look in my eyes that would return only in death, heard groans and pants I'd make again only on the point of death, smelled my body at its most intolerable-smelling. That was all.

  Of course, she'd also heard my breathless sobs. Suffering furious abuse from Benyi, we'd wanted to get the cave dug to keep a step ahead of all the bombs of the imperialists, revisionists, and counterrevolutionaries. During that time, I must've hacked five or six pickaxes to pieces. Once, when I lost my concentration, the pickaxe slipped out of my grasp and dug into my own foot-it hurt so much I burst into tears.

  She cried, too. As her hands flew to help me wrap the wound, a drop of cool water fell onto the back of my foot. It wasn't a drop of sweat, I guessed: it was a tear.

  We'd hit a seam of the most rock-hard purple-teeth soil. It was no fault of hers she couldn't help me much. Neither was it any fault of hers she couldn't avoid seeing my pitiful, utterly humiliated condition. And neither, moreover, was it any fault of hers that she had no way of returning this, this secret between us, to me, and was forced to carry it off with her, far away.

  Since points of extremity in a human lifetime are very rare, this secret took on correspondingly vast proportions, became a jewel of priceless value embedded in her memory. Maybe Fangying had realized this early on and it had produced in her a sense of horror at the thought of an unpaid loan or of having guzzled down something belonging to someone else, and maybe that was why she didn't dare glance at me when she left.

  "Looks like rain, you'd better take an umbrella with you," someone said to her.

  She nodded her head and pronounced an emphatic "uh."

  I'd caught it: her "uh" spread its wings, flew over the crowd, over the heads of children grabbing at candied fruits, and straight into my ears- it wasn't a reply to the comment about the umbrella, of course: it was an expression of farewell, of well-wishing.

  I didn't stick around till she set off, I didn't watch her three brothers haul her trousseau onto their shoulders and a new pot onto their backs, didn't watch those few kids accompany her in rowdy pursuit as she started off on her long journey. I went to the hillside behind the mountain, sat down, listened to the whispering of the wind among the leaves, and gazed at the autumn leaves filling the mountains, watching and waiting for me. The sound of the flute playing to the departing bride suddenly rose up so loud that all the autumn grasses around started to tremble and sway, before they were drowned out of view by the tears in my eyes. I had lots of reasons to cry, of course. I was crying that my family had forgotten me (I hadn't even gotten a letter from them on my birthday), I was crying about a friend's negligence at a critical time for me (this friend, off to enjoy himself in town, had carelessly lost an urgent letter I'd nagged him about again and again, an urgent letter that concerned my future job prospects). And, of course, I was also crying about this bride, a bride who bore no relation to me whatsoever, who never could bear any relation to me, who'd been banished by the sound of the flute, her pink jacket lost to a distant and unknown family, taking those worthless "uh's" of hers away from me forever.

  When I next saw her again, many years later, she was rather thinner and her face had taken on the ashen flatness of middle age. If someone standing next to me hadn't introduced us, I'd have had great difficulty making out the lines of her face as it had been all those years back. She stared momentarily, a dim flicker of recognition in her eyes, before her gaze swiftly flitted from my face. Her mind was on other things. A rural cadre who'd come to the village the same time I had was sorting out the civil dispute between her and Yanwu's family, sorting out her mother's and her younger brother's funerals, and criticizing her for running back to her parents' home to cry grievances for her brother by standing his body (see the entry for "Standing the Body"). "What more's there to say? Why won't you let the dead rest, why d'you want to make them stand! When someone's dead, doesn't matter how much fuss you make, it won't bring them back to life, doesn't matter whether you're right or wrong, no sense in making a fuss!" The cadre spoke in tones of such vexed admonition that even her brothers nodded in agreement; only she fell with a thump to her knees and, before the rural cadre had worked out what she was doing, bashed out a whole series of resonant kowtows. Two women nearby hurried forward to pull her up, tugging and yanking at her, but her face, glistening, awash with tears, kept bobbing and struggling between upright and kneeling positions as complaints continued to stream from her mouth.

  Only when the women pulled her away were her hoarse sobs finally released. She had perfectly good reasons for crying, of course: for her mother and brother (who'd just passed away, who'd died in unfortunate circumstances), that there was no way she could seek redress on her own (even her little brother couldn't help her out). In my opinion, though, her sobs were perhaps even more than that, were a kind of secret reciprocation directed toward me. Twe
nty years, it had been, twenty years: she must have heard my sorrow on the mountainside twenty years ago, and now the tears were fighting their way unstoppably out of her eyes, trying to repay a debt of tears that could never be spoken of out loud.

  The autumn grasses that filled the mountainside were a testimony to this debt of tears. They swayed in the wind, nodding in waves toward the summit. Maybe they'd silently soaked up too many human sobs, maybe that was why they'd declined into shrunken, withered reeds.

  All these years later, I revisited what had formerly been the war-preparation cave. The world war had never been fought in the end. The one we'd dug had been converted into a storage cellar for potato seeds; because it was damp, the cave walls had grown green moss and the smell of moldering sweet potatoes floated from the mouth of the cave. But circular smoke stains lingered, in a few hollows where we'd placed the oil lamp.

  There was another cave in the lower village, which had also been dug at about the same time by other people. The cave mouth was now blocked up by two scruffy wooden planks, with a mess of rice stalks, a few multicolored, now-discarded cigarette packets, and a pair of tattered shoes dropped behind them-as if someone was still living there.

  *Separated-Pot Brothers

  : "Ah-ha, an honored guest, come sit for a while in the cave." His face was familiar, but I couldn't quite remember who he was.

  "Comrade Han, how's your health?"

  "Good."

  "How's work?"

  "Good."

  "How's study?"

  "Good, quite good."

  "How are your venerable elders?"

  "Not bad."

  "Are your honorable sons and daughters obedient?"

  "I only have one daughter, but thank you for your concern."

  "Eh," he inclined his head, "is industrial production in the cities good?"

  "Of course…"

  "Is the flow of commerce in the cities also…"

  Fearing my conversation partner was about to inquire into every urban profession and trade, I hurriedly cut into this parallel sentence exchange: "I'm sorry, you are…?"

  "Parted so recently, and you don't recognize me?" He smiled at me. All this happened while I was visiting the air-raid shelter and a middleaged man popped up by my side.

  "I can't quite…"

  "You are forgetful, good sir."

  "It's not that surprising, I left here almost twenty years ago."

  "Really? Twenty years? Now that's surprising! Can it really be that one day in the cave is a thousand years in the outside world? Tsk tsk." As he spoke, he shook his head in deepest, unfathomable puzzlement.

  A distant voice, accompanied by a laugh, shouted: "That's Ma Ming!"

  "Yes, my unworthy surname is Ma, informal name Ming."

  "You're Ma Ming? The one from the House of Immortals…"

  "Ashamed, bitterly ashamed."

  Only now did I begin to remember, to remember how I'd gone to his house to paint quotations by Chairman Mao; I also noticed that a drip was hanging off the tip of his nose, as if on the point of falling, but-not falling. Each wrinkle on his face contained a rich seam of grime, but he didn't in fact look aged in the slightest. His face ruddy, his voice booming, he still looked exactly as he had before, dressed in a dirty, greasy, cotton jacket, with both hands resting inside his sleeves. The only change was that he seemed to have an extra badge from some county teachers' training college pinned to his chest, picked up from who knew where.

  "You're still living in… the House of Immortals?"

  "It has been my good fortune, my good fortune, to move to a new abode." He smiled, a segment of lotus root caked with mud in his hand, and gestured toward the interior of the air-raid shelter.

  "You live in a place as damp as this?" I was astonished.

  "You just don't understand. Men evolved from monkeys, monkeys evolved from fish, fish swim fearlessly in the sea all year long, so why on earth should they fear damp after they've turned into men?"

  "You don't get ill?"

  "I'm ashamed to say, in this lifetime of mine, I've eaten all sorts of delicious things but never known the taste of medicine." Just as he was saying this, a woman rushed over, saying a big pumpkin had disappeared from her family's garden and wanting to know whether Ma Ming had picked it. Ma Ming immediately began to glower: "Why don't you ask me whether I'm a murderer, too, while you're at it?" Seeing the woman's blank stare, he pressed his advantage with another growl: "Why don't you ask me whether I murdered Chairman Mao?" As a segue, he spat on the ground, forgetting all about me, his guest, and stalked off.

  A few kids giggling somewhere off in the distance fled in terror after one sideways glance from him.

  Off he went, spitting with anger. The last time I saw him was as I was leaving Maqiao. I spotted him standing on the mountain, as usual, leaning on a walking stick, a lone, independent figure on the hillside behind the upper village, looking far off into the vast, hazy, open fields that stretched out before him as the pink light of dawn floated over the mountain valleys. He looked to be in a complete trance. I also heard him hum a strange sort of intonation, like a moan pressed out of his gut, which turned out to be a well-known tune from television:

  Where did you come from? My friend, It's as if a butterfly has flown to my window. I don't know how many days it'll stay, We've been apart too long, too long…

  I didn't dare call out to him, as it didn't feel right disrupting the aesthetic mood evoked by his butterfly.

  It was only later that I found out those few words I'd got out of Ma Ming were quite the most courteous reception I could have hoped for. For a good few years lately, he'd severed all relations with the villagers and hadn't had a friendly look, let alone word, for anyone. Every day, footloose and fancy-free, he wandered through the mountains and surveyed the rivers, viewing the human world with a coldly indifferent eye. Once, a child fell into the pond unnoticed by anyone else in the village but him, as he stood on the hillside. He saved the child but refused even to contemplate the thanks of the child's mother, threw all the cured pork she sent to his door into the dung pit: "Don't pollute my mouth," he'd! said. He'd rather eat ants and earthworms than eat the coarse food of coarse people, than accept favors from the villagers.

  By then, he'd moved out of the House of Immortals. Maqiao's oldest residence had collapsed and Zhihuang got a few people together to rip out the foundations. A few fired bricks were still usable, so the villagers built a wayside pavilion and a small house for him. Hands in his sleeves, he went to have a look, but instead of moving into the new house uttered an uncompromising declaration of war. He chose instead to crawl into the air-raid shelter.

  He didn't do that much sleeping in the cave; far more often he'd sleep in the wild, on the mountains, using the wind for a pillow, the dew for a bed. Someone once asked him if he was afraid of being eaten by something wild while asleep on the mountain. Being eaten-what was there to be afraid of in that? he asked. In his lifetime he'd eaten a good many wild things, so it was only fair that he should be eaten back by something wild in return.

  In the years gone by, there were two people he hated most of all: first of all he hated Benyi, then after Benyi he hated Yanwu. "Devil's spawn," he'd always be backbiting, though no one knew the provenance of the enmity. In fact, the faces of all three shared certain points of resemblance: all had thin, pared-down faces, hooded eyes, chins slightly flattened then turned up, so that their lower lips were forced outwards. After this chance thought came to me, I was suddenly struck by a wild hypothesis. I imagined that after the deaths of Benyi and Yanwu, Ma Ming would, to the astonishment of all, weep and prostrate himself, eyes and nose running, before both their graves. I imagined that some other lazybones would in future perhaps spread a rumor to the effect that Ma Ming had said Benyi, Yanwu, and he were in fact blood relations, were all of the seed sown many years ago by Long Stick Xi (see the entry "Rough")-that they were what Maqiao people called separated-pot brothers.

  Separated-pot brother
s were sometimes also called borrowed-pot brothers, meaning that the brothers shared a father but, since infancy, hadn't eaten from the same pot, hadn't grown up in one family. Whether this separation was a result of legitimate adoption, or of illegitimate birth, or was forced by population drift and dispersal following bouts of pillaging, was of little import: none of this was specified. Just two factors-one, they'd been separated at the pot, and two, they were brothers-sufficed for the people of Maqiao, who seemed to stress these two crucial facts above all else. I imagine that this lazybones spreading the rumor will have asked Ma Ming, was there any proof for this allegation of his? Ma Ming would answer: when Long Stick Xi left Maqiao, he'd told him in person-at the time, he'd been just a boy and refused to believe him, he'd even spat at Long Stick Xi. Then later, as he grew up, he discovered that, in fact, in the village only Benyi, Yanwu, and he exactly reproduced Long Stick Xi's birdlike countenance; only then did he believe his real father truly had played all those dirty tricks.

  I imagine that when Maqiao people hear about this, they'll all stare and gape in shock, paralyzed like a mass of poisoned cockroaches. They'll watch Ma Ming's shadow float over the drying terrace, see him cast the occasional, icy glance out of the corners of his eyes, no one having the courage to step forward and call out at him to pause and verify the facts any further.