by Yan Lianke
‘Lingling,’ Uncle said. ‘Are you afraid?’
‘I used to be afraid of everything,’ she answered. ‘I couldn’t even watch someone kill a chicken without my knees going weak. When I started selling blood, I got braver. Now that I know I’ve got this disease, nothing scares me any more.’
‘Why did you sell your blood in the first place?’
‘So I could buy a bottle of nice shampoo. There was a girl in our village who used a certain kind of shampoo that made her hair as smooth as silk. I wanted to try it, too, but it was expensive. The girl told me that she had paid for the shampoo by selling blood, so I decided to do the same.’
When Lingling had finished, Uncle stared up at the sky for a long time. It looked like a pool of deep blue water.
‘I didn’t know that,’ he said at last.
‘Why did you do it?’
‘My older brother was a bloodhead. I saw all these other people going to him to sell their blood, so finally I did, too.’
Lingling gazed at Uncle thoughtfully. ‘Everyone says your brother’s a cheat. They say he drew a pint and a half of blood for every pint he paid for.’
This made Uncle laugh. He flashed Lingling a smile and nudged her elbow.
‘Seeing that someone stole your jacket,’ he said, shifting away from the topic of blood, ‘have you thought about getting your own back by stealing from someone else?’
‘No,’ she answered. ‘A person has to consider her reputation.’
‘If we’re going to die soon, why should we care about our reputation? You lived a respectable life, but when your husband heard you had the fever, he beat you, didn’t he? Not only did he stop caring, not only did he stop loving you, but he had to slap you around a bit before he kicked you out.’
Uncle was quiet for a moment. ‘If it were me,’ he continued, ‘I wouldn’t have told him in the first place. I’d have given him the fever. It would have served him right.’
Lingling stared at Uncle, scandalized. She shifted her body a little further away from his, as though he were a stranger to be avoided, or a thief she didn’t want to get too close to.
‘Did you pass the disease to your wife?’ she asked.
‘No, but I will, eventually.’
Uncle was squatting on the concrete, his back and head leaning against the brick wall. The cold from the bricks seeped through his padded coat and on to his skin. He suddenly felt a chill run down his spine, as if someone were pouring freezing water down his back. He lowered his head, and two streams of tears rolled down his cheeks.
Lingling could not see his tears, but she heard the rasp in his voice.
‘Do you hate your wife?’ she asked, lowering her head to look at him.
‘She was always good to me,’ Uncle answered, wiping away tears, ‘until she found out I was sick.’ Emboldened by the darkness, he turned to face his cousin’s wife. ‘I want to tell you something, Lingling, and I don’t care if you laugh at me. I’m not embarrassed. Ever since I got sick, my wife won’t let me touch her. Can you believe that? I’m not even thirty years old, and my own wife won’t let me come near her.’
Lingling lowered her head again, as if she were trying to touch it on the ground. For a very long time, she did not speak. My uncle couldn’t see her face but she was blushing hotly, the blood burning in her cheeks. After what seemed like a long time – when her hot skin had regained its coolness – only then did Lingling dare to raise her head and look at Uncle.
‘It’s the same for all of us, Ding Liang,’ she said gently. ‘I’m not afraid to tell you, either . . . After my husband found out I was sick, he never touched me again. I was only twenty-four, and only married a few months. We were newlyweds.’
At long last, Lingling and my uncle turned to face each other.
They gazed into one another’s eyes, their faces very close.
Although the moon had already passed overhead, the schoolyard glowed like the frozen surface of a pond, like light reflected in a pane of glass. Even in the shadows where they were sitting, Lingling and Uncle could see each other’s faces clearly. They could see every little detail.
It occurred to Uncle that Lingling’s face was like an apple, a plump ripe apple ready for picking. The brown patches on her face were like markings on an apple, signs of the sweetness beneath the skin. Some people thought that apples with spots were more desirable, more full of flavour. Uncle gazed at Lingling hungrily. Breathing in the scent of her skin, he thought he could detect a faint whiff of the virginal – the clean, unsullied water of a mountain spring. But Lingling also had the tinge of a newlywed, like a dash of cold water added to a pot of water just as it is about to boil over.
Uncle cleared his throat and summoned his courage. ‘Lingling,’ he announced boldly. ‘I want to ask you something.’
‘Ask me what?’
‘Oh, to hell with it,’ he blurted out. ‘You and I should be together.’
‘But . . . how can we?’ She sounded frightened.
‘Listen, both of us have been married, and both of us are going to die soon. If we want to be together, we should be. We ought to be able to do anything we please.’
Once again, Lingling seemed scandalized. She stared at my uncle in amazement, as if seeing him for the first time.
The night was getting colder. The temperature had dropped to freezing. Uncle’s face took on a bluish tinge; the brown spots on his face looked like pebbles buried in the frozen earth. Lingling gazed at him, and Uncle gazed back at her. In the end, unable to suffer the intensity of his desire, she had to turn away. Uncle’s eyes were like two dark caves that threatened to swallow her whole. Lingling lowered her head again.
‘Ding Liang,’ she spoke quietly, ‘I think you’ve forgotten that I’m married to your cousin.’
‘If he treated you well, the thought never would have crossed my mind,’ Uncle answered. ‘But your husband hasn’t been good to you, has he? He even beat you. No matter how badly my wife treated me, I never raised a hand to her.’
‘But for better or worse, you and my husband are family. He thinks of you as an older brother.’
‘Family, older brother, younger brother . . . what does any of that matter now? You and I are going to die soon.’
‘If anyone ever found out, they’d skin us alive.’
‘So let them. We’re not going to be alive much longer, anyway.’
‘I’m serious. If word got out, they’d kill us.’
‘Like I said, we’re all going to die soon. If people find out, at least you and I can die together.’
Lingling raised her head to look at Uncle. She gave him a searching look, as if she were trying to gauge whether or not he really was the person he said he was, a person who was going to die soon. His face, normally so pale in the daylight, looked different in the shadows, little more than a dark blur. The condensation from his breath was white against the darkness. When he spoke, it warmed her face like steam rising from a kettle.
‘When we’re dead,’ she said, ‘will we be buried together?’
‘I hope so,’ he answered.
‘My husband told me that even after he was dead, he didn’t want to be buried next to me.’
‘I hope they bury me next to you,’ Uncle said, moving his body closer.
He attempted an embrace, first taking hold of Lingling’s hand, then wrapping his arms around her. He held her as if she were a lost lamb that he’d found after years of searching. He held her tightly, as though fearing she might change her mind and try to run away again. Stroking his chest with her fingers, she allowed him to hold her.
The night was nearly over. Soon it would be light again, just another day. From across the plain came the sounds of morning stirring after a long night’s rest. This was the hour when snowdrifts, hidden in the shadows, hardened into ice. Snowflakes turned to hail, rattling through the sky like tiny grains of rice. They pattered on to the rooftops and covered the schoolyard, landing on Lingling and Uncle, as they sat huddled toge
ther, still wrapped in one another’s arms.
They sat like that for a long time. Then, without a word, they both stood up. They made their way silently to a small room next to the kitchen. It was a storage room used for food supplies and other odds and ends. Somehow, tacitly, it was the room they had decided on.
The room was warm, and they in turn filled the room with warmth.
There, in that storage room, they recaptured what it meant to be alive.
3
Ding Village basked in the warmth of a brilliant sun. In every direction, flowers had burst into bloom almost overnight, sweeping into the village like a tide. Luxuriant blossoms lined every street, filled every courtyard, carpeted the fields outside the village gates. Even the dried-up channel marking the ancient path of the Yellow River was a profusion of flowers: chrysanthemums, plum blossoms, peonies, roses, wild orchids, winter jasmine, dandelions, dog-tails and several kinds of flowering grasses usually only found on mountaintops. There were shades of red and yellow, purple and pink, orange and lavender and white; purplish-red and reddish-purple, greenish-blue and bluish-green, aqua tinged with jade. There were flowers of every shape and colour, strange varieties you couldn’t begin to name – some as big as serving bowls, others small as buttons. They grew from the walls and roofs of pigsties, over chicken coops and cow pens, their pungent scent wafting through the streets, washing over Ding Village like a flood, a perfumed tide . . .
Unable to fathom how hundreds of flowers could have bloomed so suddenly, Grandpa prowled the streets suspiciously, looking for signs. As he crossed the village from east to west, he noticed that the faces of the villagers – elders, adults and children alike – were all smiling. They bustled back and forth along the flower-lined streets, some balancing cloth-covered wicker baskets swinging from bamboo shoulder poles, others lugging sacks tied with rope and bulging with mysterious contents. Even tiny boys and girls of no more than a few years old seemed to be carrying heavy bundles. When Grandpa tried to ask what they were doing, no one stopped to answer him. Everyone appeared to be in a terrible hurry, rushing to and from their homes, not walking so much as running, racing from place to place.
Grandpa began to follow a group of villagers, trailing them through flower-filled streets. It wasn’t until he reached the west end of the village that he saw what all the fuss was about: the surrounding fields were quite literally awash with flowers, a vast sea of them, an endless expanse of petals rippling in the breeze. It was magnificent. Even the sky above seemed tinged with their colours: blushing, feminine pinks and faintly erotic yellows. The villagers clustered in groups, hard at work in their families’ fields. The men wielded pickaxes, and seemed to be digging up the soil around the roots of flowering plants and trees. It was as if they were rushing to break the soil and get their crops of sweet potatoes or peanuts planted before the winter set in.
Grandpa also caught sight of Li Sanren, the former mayor of Ding Village, out in his family’s field. Usually so sombre and silent, he was smiling broadly as he worked alongside the other villagers. His forehead was covered in perspiration, his backside jutting out as he dug his shovel into the ground. Every so often, he would bend over, pick up a flowering plant he had unearthed and shake clods of dirt from its roots before tossing it aside and moving on to the next one. After he had uprooted and shaken a few dozen, he would squat down next to his wife and children to gather the clods of dirt from the ground and toss them into two wicker baskets. When the baskets were full, he covered them with bed sheets, lifted them on a shoulder pole and headed for home. Staggering under the weight of those baskets, Li Sanren seemed in danger of falling, but he soldiered on, forcing himself to keep walking . . .
Once upon a time, Li Sanren had been the mayor of Ding Village. Just a few years younger than Grandpa, he was a former military man who had been posted to the pleasant city of Hangzhou, known throughout China as ‘the paradise of the south’. In a fenced-off army barracks outside the city, he had served his country, received commendations for his service and become an official member of the Chinese Communist Party. But when the time came for him to be promoted, he had a sudden realization. After much soul-searching and nail-biting, he penned a letter to his commanding officers. It read like a blood oath: in it, he vowed to return to his hometown and help transform Ding Village into ‘a paradise of the north’.
And so he left the army.
Over the next few decades, Li Sanren worked day and night helping the villagers to plant and harvest, irrigate their fields and collect manure for use as fertilizer. When the higher-ups said to turn the soil, he did. When they said to plant wheat seedlings or cotton, he did. But years passed like days, and soon decades had gone by. Other than an increase in population, the village was unchanged, exactly the way it was when he’d started. In all those years, Ding Village had not managed to add a single new tile-roofed house. It had not acquired a single new piece of machinery or farm equipment. Even the number of pull-tractors was exactly the same. The surrounding villages of Willow Hamlet, Yellow Creek and Two-Li Village were also still quite poor, but Ding Village was skeletally poor by comparison. A village of skin and bones.
One day, a villager walked up to Li Sanren and spat in his face. ‘Li Sanren, you’ve got some nerve, calling yourself our leader,’ the man complained. ‘In all the years you’ve been village mayor and party secretary, my family hasn’t had one square meal. We can’t even afford to have dumplings at New Year!’
In the end, Li Sanren was removed from office. As soon as the blood-selling began, he was sacked. He became silent and taciturn, hardly speaking to the other villagers. His face turned ashen and grey, as if someone had slapped him with the sole of a dirty shoe.
The higher-ups, taking notice of my dad’s success in the blood trade, asked him to become the mayor of Ding Village. They hoped he’d help the village set up a few more blood-collection stations and foster a few more successful blood merchants, instead of spending his time collecting blood for his own business. Realizing that more bloodheads meant more competition for him, and less money for his family, Dad turned down the job, leaving Ding Village without a mayor. The post would remain empty for many years. Even today, the village doesn’t have a mayor.
When the higher-ups called on the people of Ding Village to sell more blood, Li Sanren stubbornly refused to participate. He wanted no part of it. ‘I didn’t spend all those years as mayor,’ he argued, ‘to see it come to this . . . folks out there selling their own blood.’
But Li Sanren’s wife, after visiting the fancy new tile-roofed houses of her friends and neighbours who’d sold their blood, took to cursing her husband in public. ‘Li Sanren, you call yourself a man? You’re not even man enough to sell blood. With you as mayor all those years, it’s no wonder that the women in this village can’t even afford sanitary pads! It’s all your fault. You’re nothing better than a eunuch, a coward who’s too scared to sell a pint of blood, much less half a pint, or a drop, even! What kind of man gets scared by a few drops of his own blood?’
That day, Li Sanren was squatting outside the door of his house, eating his dinner. He allowed his wife to curse him, suffering her insults and abuse without comment.
When she had finished her tirade, he threw his empty bowl on the ground and walked off without a word. She supposed he had got sick of listening to her and had just gone out for a walk. But later, as she was washing up the dishes and getting ready to feed the pigs, Li Sanren walked into the kitchen clutching a 100-yuan bill. One of his sleeves was rolled up to the elbow, and he was flexing and pinching the exposed arm. His face was unusually pale, covered with nervous perspiration. He crossed the kitchen, placed the bill on a corner of the stove and turned to his wife.
‘There,’ he said tearfully. ‘You see? I sold my blood.’
She paused from her washing up and stared at her husband’s pale face.
‘Well, that’s more like it,’ she said, laughing. ‘Now you’re a real man.’
S
he looked at him. ‘Do you want some sugar-water?’
‘No,’ he answered, his eyes filled with tears. ‘I spent half my life working for the revolution, and now I’ve been reduced to selling my blood.’
Soon Li Sanren was selling his blood regularly. At first it was just once a month, then every twenty days, then every ten. Towards the end, if he had gone too long without selling blood, his veins would begin to feel swollen. It was as if they were bursting with blood. If the blood wasn’t siphoned out it would begin to seep from his pores.
As the number of villagers selling their blood increased, so did the number of bloodheads. There was a lot of competition. Bloodheads began going door to door with their equipment, collecting plasma as if it were scrap metal or worn-out shoes. You didn’t even have to leave your house. Every day you would hear them calling – ‘Blood collector! Anyone selling blood?’ – like pedlars hawking their wares.
Blood merchants even went out into the fields to collect blood from farmers working their land.
‘Hey, there!’ the bloodhead would shout. ‘Got any blood to sell?’
‘Go away,’ the farmer would reply, ‘I just sold some.’
But the bloodhead wouldn’t go away.
‘That’s some fine-looking wheat you’ve got there. The sprouts are nice and dark.’
The farmer would beam with pride. ‘Can you guess how much chemical fertilizer I used?’
The bloodhead would then kneel down for a closer look, as if admiring the newly sprouted wheat. ‘I don’t know how much you used, but I know you probably paid for it by selling blood. A pint of blood will buy you two bags of chemical fertilizer. On this little plot, one bag should be enough for a bumper harvest.’
‘Of course, farming’s the main thing,’ the bloodhead would say casually. ‘Some people quit farming when they start selling blood, or even abandon their land. Of course, blood always replenishes itself, but a person can only live so long. Even if you live to be a hundred, you can’t keep selling blood past a certain age. But a plot of land like this . . . you can farm it for a hundred, even a thousand years, and it’ll keep producing great harvests. Blood-selling is different. You can’t do that for hundreds or thousands of years. Am I right?’
