by Yan Lianke
So many people were dying, so many were dead. In one household, a family might weep for a day before burying their relative in a black wooden coffin that had cost their life savings. In another household, there might be sighs instead of tears, a family gathering around the corpse in silent vigil before the burial.
The three elderly village carpenters worked all day long building coffins. Two of them came down with backaches from overwork. The paulownia trees used to make the coffins were all chopped down. There was no timber left in the village.
Old Mister Wang, the maker of funeral wreaths, was kept busy cutting and snipping paper flowers, until his hands were covered in blisters that dried into hard, yellow calluses.
The villagers became indolent and indifferent to everyday life. With death camped on their doorsteps, no one could be bothered to till the fields or do any planting. No one bothered to leave the village to look for seasonal work. The villagers spent their days at home, their doors and windows shut to stop the fever from coming in.
But that’s what they were waiting for, waiting for the fever to rush in and kill them. Day by day they waited and watched. Some said that the government was planning to send trucks and soldiers to round up people with the fever and bury them alive in the Gobi Desert, like they used to do with plague victims long ago. Although everyone knew that this was just a rumour, somewhere in their hearts they believed it. They locked their doors and windows, stayed at home and waited for the fever to come, and for more people to die.
As the villagers died off, so did the village.
The earth grew barren. No one turned the soil.
The fields grew dry. No one watered the crops.
In some of the homes that had been touched by death, the families had stopped doing the housework. They no longer washed the pots and pans. From one meal to the next, they cooked rice in the same unwashed pot and ate with the same dirty bowls and chopsticks.
If you hadn’t seen someone in the village for weeks, you didn’t ask where he or she had gone. You just assumed they were dead. If you happened to run into them a few days later, perhaps while drawing water at the well, you’d just stop and stare in shock. There would be a long silence as you stared at each other in amazement. Then you’d say: ‘My God, you’re still alive.’ And he might answer, ‘I was in bed with a headache. I thought it was the fever, but as it turns out, it wasn’t.’ After some relieved laughter, you would brush past each other, you with your shoulder pole and wooden buckets filled with water, he continuing his way to the well with empty ones.
That’s what our village had become.
Ding Village in the days of fever, the days of agony and waiting.
After making up his mind to talk to my father, Grandpa left the school and trudged down the road to the village. It was sunset, and the light had already begun to fade. When Grandpa reached the centre of the village, he saw Ma Xianglin sitting outside his house repairing his three-stringed fiddle. Ma Xianglin was an amateur singer and storyteller. And Ma Xianglin had the fever. The instrument he used to accompany his singing hadn’t been played in many years; its lacquered surface was chipped and peeling. Ma Xianglin had built his family’s three-bedroom brick house by selling his blood. Now, as he sat beneath the tiled eaves of the house he’d bought and paid for, he took up his fiddle and began to sing hoarsely, in a voice as rough as tree bark:
The sun that sets in the western hills
and rises from the eastern sea
brings another day of joy,
or another day of misery . . .
The grain you sell for pocket change
brings another day of plenty,
or another day of want . . .
Listening to Ma Xianglin sing, you would never guess that he was sick. But Grandpa could see that the colour of death was on him. As he drew closer, he noticed a greenish tinge to Ma Xianglin’s skin. Then there were the sores, pustules that had hardened into dark red scabs, dotting his face like shrivelled, sun-dried peas. When Ma Xianglin caught sight of Grandpa, he put down his fiddle and smiled. It was the sickly, hopeful, overeager smile of a beggar hoping for food.
‘Professor Ding,’ called Ma Xianglin in his sing-song voice. ‘I heard you had a meeting with the higher-ups.’
Grandpa couldn’t help but stare. ‘Xianglin, since when did you lose so much weight?’
‘I haven’t lost weight. I can still eat two steamed buns at one sitting . . . so what did they say?’ Ma Xianglin asked impatiently. ‘Have they found a cure?’
Grandpa thought for a moment. ‘Sure. They said the new medicine will be here any day now. One shot and you’ll be cured.’
Xianglin grinned. ‘When do we get the new medicines?’
‘It won’t be long.’
‘How long is not long?’
‘Not long. No more than a few days.’
‘How many days, exactly?’
‘If we don’t get the medicines in a few days, I’ll go back and ask them.’ Grandpa turned and continued towards my father’s house.
Turning into a narrow alleyway, Grandpa noticed white funeral scrolls pasted on the lintels of every house. Some of the scrolls were old and yellowed; others new and blindingly white. With all that white paper fluttering in the breeze, the alley looked like it had been hit by a snowstorm. Further down the alley, Grandpa passed the house of a family whose son had died of the fever just before his thirtieth birthday. The funeral couplet pasted on the lintels read: Since you have gone, the house is empty, it has been three seasons now / Extinguish the lamps, let the twilight come, we must endure the setting sun. Then there was the Li family, whose daughter-in-law had died of the fever not long after marrying their son. She had been infected with the disease in her hometown and passed it on to her husband and newborn child. Hoping that their son and grandchild would take a turn for the better, the family had pasted up this couplet: The moon has sunk, the stars are dim, the family home is dark / but there is hope that come tomorrow, the sun will shine again.
At the next house there were two white scrolls, one on either side of the door, with no calligraphy at all. Curious as to why anyone would bother to paste up blank funeral scrolls, Grandpa took a closer look. It was only when he ran his fingers over the scrolls that he discovered two more layers of paper underneath. At least three people in this house had died from the fever. The family, either too tired or too superstitious to write yet another funeral couplet, had simply pasted up the new scrolls and left them blank.
As Grandpa stood in the doorway staring at the empty scrolls, he heard Ma Xianglin, who had followed him down the alley, shouting after him.
‘Professor Ding! Since the new medicine will be here soon, why not celebrate?’ Grandpa turned around slowly.
‘Tell everyone to come to the school, and I’ll put on a concert for the whole village. You know how well I sing, and people need an excuse to get out of their houses,’ said Ma Xianglin.
‘The school is the perfect place for a concert.’ Ma Xianglin took a few steps forward.
‘If you ask, everyone will listen. Just like they did when you asked them to sell their blood. And it was your son Ding Hui they sold it to, even though everyone knew he used the same needles and cotton swabs again and again. Not to bring up the past . . . but every time I sold my blood, I went to your son, reused needles or not. I sold him everything I had, and now when I run into him on the street, he can’t even be bothered to say hello. Of course, that’s all in the past, no point bringing it up now. All I ask is that you tell everyone to come to the school so I can sing them a few songs. I don’t mean to harp on the past, Professor, really I don’t. Just let me sing a few folk songs so I won’t feel so depressed. Otherwise, I’m afraid I won’t live long enough to see those new medicines.’
Ma Xianglin, now standing a few paces away, stared into Grandpa’s eyes. A beggar hoping for food. Over Ma Xianglin’s shoulder, Grandpa saw several other villagers gazing at him expectantly. There was Li Sanren, the former village may
or; Zhao Xiuqin, a local loudmouth known for her delicious cooking; and Zhao Dequan, a simple, honest farmer. Grandpa knew them well, and knew that they all had the fever. He knew exactly what they had come to ask.
‘The new medicine will be here any day now,’ he announced loudly. ‘Xianglin, when do you want to give your concert?’
The old musician beamed. ‘Tonight. Or if that’s too soon, tomorrow night. Tell the villagers I’ll sing anything they like, for as long as they want to listen.’
3
After parting from Ma Xianglin with promises, Grandpa continued walking towards our house. My family lived on New Street, south of the village. Built during the blood boom, New Street was the newest street in the village. If you got rich from buying or selling blood, you moved your family from the village centre to New Street and built a brand new two-storey house, which was as high as local building regulations allowed. Each lot was about one mu, one-sixth of an acre, with a house at one end and brick walls enclosing the other three sides. Every house was covered in white ceramic tiles, and the walls were built from machine-made red brick. Red and white: the colours of joy and sorrow. All year round, the neighbourhood gave off the smell of newness and wealth. There was also a tinge of gold and a whiff of sulphur. The whole street smelled of sulphur, brick and mortar.
In the midst of all this stood our house. Night and day, the stench of sulphur filled our nostrils, stung our eyes and provoked people to envy. Everyone wanted a house on New Street, and those who couldn’t afford one were willing to sell their blood to get it.
That’s how they got the fever.
In all, about two-dozen families lived on New Street. At the head of every household was a blood merchant, or ‘bloodhead’. The bloodheads made more money than anybody else and that’s why they could afford to live on New Street. They moved south of the village, and built new houses. It was the bloodheads who made New Street what it was.
My father was the first blood merchant in the village and he soon became the richest. That is the reason why our house, which was built at the very centre of New Street, was three-storeys high, even though the local building regulations limited each house to only two. If anyone else had tried to do the same, the government would have put a stop to it. But when my father added a third storey, no one seemed to mind.
We didn’t set out to build a three-storey home, not at first. When everyone else was living in thatched, mud-brick cottages, my father built a single-storey house of brick and tiles. When everyone else started building brick-and-tile houses, my father tore down ours and built a new two-storey in its place. When everyone else started building two-storey houses, my father added a third storey. When other people tried to add a third storey or build a three-storey home from the ground up, the government stepped in, saying that regulations limited model villages to buildings of no more than two storys.
But our house had three storeys: one more than anyone else.
Like most people in the village, we had a pig pen and a chicken coop in our courtyard. But they seemed out of place, they didn’t match the architecture of our house. Even the pigeon cages beneath the eaves seemed out of place. In designing our house, my father had tried to copy the fancy western-style homes that he’d seen in the big city of Kaifeng. He ordered pink-and-white marble tiles for the floors and paved the courtyard with square slabs of concrete. Instead of a tried and true outdoor squat toilet of the sort that Chinese people had been using successfully for hundreds, even thousands of years, we had an indoor toilet made of white porcelain. But my parents, unable to adapt to shitting while sitting down, ended up building a squat latrine behind the house, anyway.
We also had a washing machine and a laundry room, but my mother preferred to take her basin out into the courtyard to do the washing there.
The toilet and the washing machine were just for show. Ditto for the freezer and the refrigerator, the dining room and dining table. We had these things in our house, but only to show that we could afford them. None of us actually used them.
When Grandpa arrived at our house that evening, he found the front gate locked and the whole family out in the courtyard having their dinner of steamed buns, rice soup and a stew of glass noodles, turnip and cabbage. Confetti-sized bits of red pepper clung to the cabbage, making it look like someone had shredded a Chinese New Year’s calendar into the stew. Seated on low stools around a small table in the centre of the courtyard, my parents and sister were in the middle of eating their dinner when they heard a knock at the gate and saw that it was Grandpa.
My little sister let him in and closed the gate. My mother pulled up another stool and ladled out an extra bowl of soup. Grandpa picked up his chopsticks, but instead of eating, he stared at my father as if he were a stranger. There was no warmth in Grandpa’s eyes.
My father gazed back at Grandpa just as coldly. Two complete strangers.
‘Dad, why aren’t you eating?’ he asked, finally.
‘Son, there’s something weighing on my mind and I’ve got to say it.’
‘Can’t it wait until we’ve eaten?’
‘No, I won’t be able to eat a bite or sleep a wink until I say this.’
My father set down his bowl, laid his chopsticks across the rim and cast a sideways glance at Grandpa. ‘All right, go ahead.’
‘I had a meeting in the county today . . .’ Grandpa began.
‘And they told you that the fever is AIDS, and that AIDS is a new and incurable disease, right?’ my father interrupted.
‘You might as well eat your dinner, Dad, because you’re not telling me anything I don’t already know. Two out of three people in the village know it. It’s just the sick ones who don’t, and most of them are just pretending not to know.’ He looked at Grandpa with disdain. It was the sort of glance a student might give a teacher setting an exam on some subject his students had long since mastered. Then, ignoring Grandpa, he took up his bowl and chopsticks and buried himself in his meal.
Grandpa was a teacher, sort of. He had spent his whole life working in the school and ringing the school bell. Now, in his sixtieth year, he was still the designated caretaker and bell-ringer. Sometimes, when one of the teachers got sick or couldn’t teach for some reason, he was called in to take their place. On these occasions, he might spend half a day teaching the opening stanzas of the Three-Character Classic, which he would write out in painstaking, platter-sized characters on the blackboard.
Dad had once been a student in Grandpa’s class, but he no longer deferred to him as a former teacher. Grandpa could see the disrespect in his son’s eyes. As he watched my father take up his bowl and continue eating, Grandpa gently set down his own bowl and chopsticks on the table.
After a long silence, he said: ‘Son, it’s not like I’m asking you to commit suicide. I just think you should kowtow in front of the villagers and apologize for what you’ve done.’
My father glared at him. ‘Why should I?’
‘Because you were a bloodhead.’
‘So was everyone who lives on this street.’
‘They were just following your lead. No one made as much blood money as you.’
My father slammed down his bowl, spilling soup all over the table. He threw down his chopsticks. They rolled across the tabletop and clattered to the ground.
‘Dad,’ he said, glaring at Grandpa. ‘If you ever raise this subject again, you’re no father to me. And you can forget about me supporting you in your old age, or even going to your funeral.’
Grandpa sat woodenly, staring down at the table. Finally, he spoke.
‘Son, I’m begging you . . . get down on your knees and apologize to the villagers. How can you refuse an old man?’ he said softly.
‘Dad, I think you should leave,’ my father was nearly shouting. ‘Because if you say another word, you’re no father to me.’
‘Hui, it’s not that much to ask. One little apology and we can put this all behind us.’
‘Get out,’ my father screamed. ‘Y
ou’re not my father and I’m not your son!’
Grandpa paused for a moment to take in my father’s words. ‘More than forty people in this village have died,’ he said as he stood up to leave. ‘That makes forty apologies, forty kowtows. Or is that too exhausting for you? Would it kill you to apologize?’
Grandpa suddenly looked weary, as if the effort of making this speech had exhausted him. He glanced at my mother, then at my little sister Yingzi.
‘Yingzi, come to school tomorrow and I’ll help you make up those missed classes. Your regular teacher isn’t coming back, so I’ll be teaching language class from now on.’
When Grandpa left, no one bothered to see him to the door. He slowly shuffled out, his back hunched and his head bowed, like an old mountain goat after a long day’s trek.
CHAPTER TWO
1
There are only three streets in our village. One runs east to west, the other two run north to south. Before New Street, the village streets formed a perfect cross, the same shape as the Chinese ideograph meaning ‘ten’. After New Street was added, the village looked more like a cross with a horizontal line underneath, the same as the Chinese ideograph meaning ‘earth’.
After his fight with my dad, Grandpa left New Street and went to my uncle’s house, where he brooded for a while before walking the mile back to the elementary school. The school had originally been part of a village temple dedicated to Guan Yu, the god of wealth. Guan Yu’s shrine had occupied the main hall and the classrooms were in an adjacent wing. For decades the villagers had come to the temple to burn incense and pray for wealth, but when they started getting rich from selling blood, they tore down the temple. They didn’t believe in Guan Yu any more: they believed in selling blood.
After the villagers converted to blood-selling, they built a new school on several acres of uncultivated land, just south of the village. They built a red-brick wall and a two-storey schoolhouse facing east. They installed plate glass in all the windows and wooden signs on all the classroom doors: ‘Grade One, Class One’; ‘Grade Two, Class One’, ‘Grade Three, Class One’, although because the village was so small, there was never more than one class per grade. A basketball hoop was put up in the schoolyard, and a wooden placard reading Ding Village Elementary School was hung from the main gate. And that was it: Ding Village had a brand new school. Grandpa moved in as the permanent caretaker. And besides Grandpa, there were two other teachers, one to teach mathematics and one for language. Both were young and had been hired from outside the village. The only thing was . . . when they found out that Ding Village had the fever, they both stopped teaching and never came back.
