by Yan Lianke
Now they were speaking the same language. Setting his work aside, the farmer would walk to the edge of his field to talk to this friendly stranger, a bloodhead from another village. After chatting for a while, the farmer would impulsively roll up his sleeve and hold out his arm. ‘Tell you what,’ he’d say, ‘seeing as how we’ve hit it off so well, what do you say I sell you a pint?’
After the farmer had sold another pint of his blood, and the merchant had paid for it, the two would part like old friends.
Having established this comfortable rapport, the blood merchant would visit often. Every few weeks, he’d arrive at the field with his syringes and tubes, to chat for a while and extract another pint of blood from the farmer’s veins. That was how it worked.
One day, Li Sanren was out in his field, using a pickaxe to turn the soil in the corners where his plow couldn’t reach. The wheat harvest was over, and it was time to plant the autumn corn. Autumn planting was different from summer planting: it was more of a race against time. If a farmer could manage to get his seed corn into the ground just one day early, it might ripen several days ahead of schedule, allowing him to harvest it before the winds and rain set in. Li Sanren knew how important it was to plant his seed corn within the next couple of days.
Turning the soil at the edges of his plot was back-breaking work that had to be done manually. Now that Li Sanren was selling blood two or three times a month, his face had turned sallow, as if his skin were coated with a thin layer of wax. When he’d been the mayor, he could swing a pickaxe as easily as if it were the handle of a hoe, but now it felt like trying to heft a boulder.
Although it was autumn, the summer heat had not yet passed. If you looked to the horizon, the scorching sun made it look like the whole plain was ablaze. As Li Sanren swung his pickaxe, breaking up the clods of dirt, sweat poured down his face like rainwater. He was barefoot, stripped to the waist, his back glistening with moisture as if he’d just taken a swim. His sweat made the red sesame-sized needle marks on his bare arms itch and swell to the size of mosquito bites. He was nearing the end of his strength. The previous year, he’d turned the soil on the borders of his plot in only half a day. But this year, after six months of selling blood, he’d been working for two days straight and the job was only half-finished.
The sun was high in the sky. Smoke rose from the chimneys of Ding Village and wafted through the air like plumes of white silk. By now, my grandmother had been dead nearly three months. She had trodden on a basin that my dad left lying on the ground and had ended up covered in Type-A blood. When she saw all the blood, she collapsed from fright. From then on, she suffered from panic attacks and an irregular heartbeat. Eventually, the strain on her heart proved to be too much: it stopped beating entirely, and she died. After her death, my dad and my uncle swore tearfully that they’d stop buying and collecting blood, that they’d give up the trade altogether. But now, only three months later, they were at it again, making the rounds with their three-wheeled cart.
On this particular day, Dad and Uncle were cycling home from a remote village, far from the main road, where they’d gone to collect blood. Their three-wheeled cart was crammed with bottles and bags full of blood plasma. It was high season for farmers, who couldn’t spare the time to leave their fields and get to the nearest blood station. But my dad had signed a contract promising to deliver a certain amount to the blood-collection trucks each day.
Because he had a quota to fill, my dad had no choice but to go out to the remote villages and into the fields. He had no choice but to stand in the fields and call for the farmers to come and sell their blood.
On their way back to the village, Dad and Uncle saw Li Sanren turning the soil in his field. Uncle stopped the cart at the edge of the field.
‘Hey, you! Got any blood to sell?’
Li Sanren raised his head and stared at Uncle a moment before continuing his work.
‘Oi!’ Uncle called again. ‘You selling or not?’
‘You Dings,’ Li Sanren spat, ‘you won’t be satisfied until you’ve milked this village dry.’
Uncle, who was still only eighteen at the time, cursed under his breath. ‘Fuck you, you old bastard. We show up at your field with cash in hand and still you won’t sell.’
Dad joined Uncle at the edge of the field. After observing Li Sanren for a while, he stepped down and began walking across the spongy soil. It was like walking over a field of cotton, each step releasing a burst of rich, sweet scent. When he was standing face to face with Li Sanren, Dad greeted him politely.
‘Hello, Mr Mayor, sir.’
Li Sanren stared at my father in shock, his pickaxe frozen in mid-air. It had been nearly two years since anyone had called him mayor, much less ‘sir’. Although Li Sanren said nothing, he put down his pickaxe and listened to what my dad had to say.
‘Mr Mayor, sir, a few days ago I attended a meeting to talk about my experience in the blood trade with some of the county cadres. Both the county governor and the director of education in charge of rural development and poverty alleviation criticized Ding Village for not selling enough blood. They were also displeased that we don’t have a village cadre to help organize blood-collection efforts. They asked if I’d be willing to step in and become mayor.’
Here, my father paused and peered at the former mayor, as if trying to gauge his reaction. Li Sanren peered back at him.
‘Of course, I’d never take the job,’ Dad assured him. ‘I told them there’s only one person in this village qualified to be mayor, and that’s you.’
Li Sanren stared, his eyes widening.
‘My family founded this village,’ Dad continued, ‘and although you and I might not share the same name, I’ll be the first to say that no one has worked harder for this village than you. As long as you’re alive, no one will ever take your place. As long as you’re here, there’s no one more qualified to lead this village.’
When he had finished speaking, my father turned and began retracing his steps across the field. Grasshoppers and insects leaped out from the newly turned soil, landing on his shoes and running up his body. He jiggled his arms and legs, trying to shake them off. As he reached the edge of the field, he heard Li Sanren calling from behind him.
‘Ding Hui, come back! I suppose I can risk selling one more pint.’
‘Your face looks a bit jaundiced,’ Dad noted. ‘Maybe you ought to wait a few more days.’
‘When you’ve lived through everything I have,’ Li Sanren said stoically, ‘there’s nothing scary about selling a little blood. And damn, what’s a few drops of blood, if it’ll help my country?’
When Li Sanren was lying comfortably in the shade of a tree beside his field, head pillowed on the handle of his pickaxe, Dad hung an empty plasma bag from a branch above him. Uncle plunged a needle into Li Sanren’s vein, and his blood began to flow through the plastic tubing – about as wide as a chopstick – and slowly fill the bag.
The print on the bag said ‘500 cc’, but it held 600 when full. If you tapped lightly on the bag while you were drawing blood, you might manage to draw as much as 700 cc without the donor even realizing.
Naturally, Dad tapped on the bag as he drew Li Sanren’s blood, claiming that this was necessary to prevent the blood from coagulating. All the while, he kept up a steady stream of conversation.
‘Besides you, no one in this village is qualified to be mayor.’
‘I’ve had enough,’ sighed Li Sanren. ‘I spent half my life working for this village.’
‘But you’re not even fifty. You’re too young to retire.’
‘If I do make a comeback, Ding Hui, I hope you’ll be my second-in-charge.’
‘I already told the county governor and the director of education that if you don’t come out of retirement and take command, they could beat me to death and I still wouldn’t accept the post.’
‘How much blood have you taken?’
‘Don’t worry. It’s almost full.’
Soon the
bag was full to bursting. When Uncle took it down from the tree, it jiggled like a distended hot-water bottle.
From the shadowy field rose the thick, sweet stench of blood. A smell like freshly picked red berries boiling in a pot of water. After uncle had removed the needle from the crook of Li Sanren’s arm and begun packing up his equipment, my father handed the former mayor a crisp 100-yuan note.
‘Do you need change?’ Li Sanren asked.
‘Well, the price of plasma is down,’ answered Dad. ‘It’s only eighty yuan per bag now.’
‘Then I’ll give you twenty back.’
‘No, Mr Mayor,’ Dad said, grasping him by the hand, ‘please don’t insult me. It’s just a few yuan. Even if it were fifty yuan, I still couldn’t take it.’
Li Sanren sheepishly accepted the money. His face was unnaturally pale. His pallor, and the beads of sweat pouring down his face, made him look like a wax figure that had been left out in the rain. He tried to stand up and walk back to his field, but before he had taken more than a few steps, he began to sway and had to squat down on the ground, leaning on the handle of his pickaxe.
‘Ding Hui!’ he cried. ‘I’m feeling dizzy. It’s like everything is spinning.’
‘I didn’t make you sell your blood,’ Dad chided. ‘But you insisted. Want us to turn you upside down and get your blood flowing again?’
‘Might as well try,’ Li Sanren agreed.
He lay back down on the ground and allowed Dad and Uncle to grasp his legs and lift him into the air until he was hanging upside down. They let him dangle there for a while, gently shaking his legs to get the blood moving towards his head, as though he were a pair of just-washed trousers they were trying to shake the excess water from.
When they had finished shaking him, they lowered him to the ground. ‘Feeling any better?’
Li Sanren stood up slowly, took a few steps and smiled. ‘Much better. When you’ve lived through everything I have, there’s nothing scary about selling a little blood.’
Dad and Uncle got into their three-wheeled cart and began pedalling away.
Still unsteady on his feet and leaning on his pickaxe for support, Li Sanren headed back to his field to continue his work. Watching him, Dad and Uncle were worried he might collapse again, but fortunately he didn’t. When he reached the centre of his field, Li Sanren turned back and shouted, ‘Don’t forget, Ding Hui! If I become mayor again, I want you as my second-in-command!’
Dad and Uncle turned to smile at him and continued on their way. When they reached the entrance to the village, they noticed that there seemed to be a lot of villagers lying about in the sunshine, on every small slope or bit of slanted ground. They had their feet elevated and heads pointed downhill, as was their practice when they’d just given blood and felt dizzy. Other villagers had taken wooden doors from their courtyards and propped them up on two differently sized stools, to form a slanted platform on which they could recline. Some of the younger men stood on their heads with their heels resting against walls, a pastime known as ‘irrigating the brain’. Dad and Uncle realized that while they had been away collecting blood in another village, a different crew of bloodheads had come to Ding Village to poach their customers. They stopped in the street and stared around them. Dad was too shocked to speak; Uncle too angry not to.
‘You motherfuckers!’ Uncle shouted. ‘You fucking mother-fuckers!’
It wasn’t clear who he was cursing, the villagers or the bloodheads.
Li Sanren was not yet fifty when he started selling his blood. Once he started selling, there was no going back. In the blood trade, there were beginnings but no endings. By the time Li Sanren realized he had the fever, he was nearly sixty. Because of his age, the disease seemed to hit him harder than it did anyone else, leaving him too weak to speak. It was an ending, of sorts. It was an ending to all his years of hoping that he might become mayor again. After ten years, Ding Village still had no local cadre, and the higher-ups had never bothered to appoint a new mayor.
Li Sanren had aged rapidly. Nearing sixty, he looked more like a man in his seventies. It seemed likely that he would die soon, perhaps even in a matter of months. His illness had reached a critical stage. He walked slowly, painfully, as if his feet were weighted down with boulders. ‘I don’t see why you can’t live in the school like all the others,’ his wife complained, ‘instead of staying home and making me wait on you all day long.’ And so the former mayor moved into the school to live with the other sick villagers. After that, he rarely ever spoke. He spent his days alone, taking slow solitary walks in the schoolyard, watching but never interacting with the others. Each night, he climbed into the bed he’d made in a corner of the classroom and went to sleep. It was as if he spent every day waiting to die. But on this particular day, the sun had come out, and it was dazzling . . .
Ding Village was alive with flowers, blanketing the earth with colour and filling the sky with their perfume. The villagers waded through this sea of flowers, some digging in the ground with spades and shovels, others carrying loads on their shoulders or backs. Too winded by their exertions to speak, they worked steadily and silently; faces glistening with sweat and wreathed in smiles, they bustled here and there, back and forth. From his position at the entrance to the village, Grandpa could see Li Sanren emerging from the fields, carrying two baskets on a bamboo shoulder pole. Because the baskets were draped with sheets, Grandpa could not see what was in them, but judging from the way they sagged towards the ground, the contents must have been incredibly heavy. With every step he took, the shoulder pole creaked and groaned under the weight of those baskets. Now that his illness was full-blown, Li Sanren certainly didn’t have much longer to live, but he seemed happy somehow, his face beaming as he shouldered his heavy burden. As he drew nearer, Grandpa rushed up and asked what he was carrying, but like the other villagers, Li Sanren smiled and said nothing. He paused for a moment to shift the weight of the pole to his other shoulder, then brushed past grandpa and continued on his way. He seemed to be heading home. Just then, Li Sanren’s five- or six-year-old grandson appeared out of nowhere, clutching a large bundle – it seemed to be something wrapped in clothing – in his arms. Shouting ‘Grandpa! Grandpa!’ as he ran, the little boy tried to catch up with Li Sanren. As he passed my grandfather, the little boy tripped over a winter-jasmine bush that had sprung up in the middle of the road, and went tumbling head over heels. The bundle flew from his arms, its contents falling into the road with much clinking and clanging. Turning to see what had caused such a racket, my grandfather froze in amazement. Joyous amazement. Never in his life could he have imagined what was contained in that bundle: there were glittering gold bars, shiny gold coins, and golden nuggets the size of plump peanuts. Beneath the surface of the flower-filled plain, there was gold growing in the soil. It had been there all along. Sitting in the middle of the road and staring at the gold that had slipped from his grasp, Li Sanren’s little grandson began to cry. Thinking that he ought to help the boy, Grandpa walked over and stretched out his arm . . . and in that moment . . .
The dream ended. Grandpa was awake.
It was Li Sanren, standing beside his bed, who had woken him.
4
Grandpa realized he must have been asleep. At least, it seemed like he had been asleep. He had a hazy recollection of Li Sanren tiptoeing into his room and standing beside his bed for a while, before whispering, ‘Shuiyang . . . Ding Shuiyang?’ That was what had woken him.
Grandpa noticed that his arm was lying on top of his quilt, rather than tucked warmly underneath. It was the same outstretched arm he had offered to Li Sanren’s little grandson. He could remember the scene vividly, he could still see it . . . he could see . . .
. . . a vast expanse of flowers on the plain, a sea of flowers covering Ding Village, the surrounding fields and the distant riverbed where once the Yellow River flowed. A rainbow of sparkling colours, and underneath, the glitter of gold . . . gold bricks, gold tiles, gold bars, gold nuggets, go
ld lumps and bits of gold as tiny and as numerous as grains of wheat or sand . . . Grandpa shut his eyes, trying to picture the flowers and the gold that grew beneath them, hoping to recapture the scene . . .
But the scene had faded. It was gone.
Hearing his name being whispered again, Grandpa rolled over in bed with a smile, ready to tell Li Sanren about the dream he had been having. But as soon as he saw the stricken look on Li Sanren’s face, the words died on his lips.
‘Sanren, what’s happened?’ Grandpa asked, sitting up in his bed.
‘That goddamned thief . . .’ Li Sanren’s voice was choked with anger. ‘He has no respect for anything. There’s nothing that bastard won’t steal.’
‘What have you lost?’
‘The one thing I couldn’t afford to lose.’
‘What on earth did you lose?’ Grandpa asked impatiently, throwing on his clothes. ‘Honestly, Sanren, when you were the mayor, no one could out-talk you. These days, you can’t even form a coherent sentence.’
Li Sanren searched Grandpa’s face. After a moment of hesitation, he spoke. ‘I might as well tell you the truth, Shuiyang. After I left office, I kept the official seal of the village party committee. I thought that since the village didn’t have a mayor or a party secretary, I ought to hold on to it for safekeeping. All these years, I’ve never let it out of my sight. Last night before I went to sleep, I hid the seal and a bit of cash under my pillow. When I woke up this morning, they were gone.
‘I don’t care about the cash,’ Li Sanren continued earnestly. ‘But I can’t afford to lose that seal. I’ve got to get it back, no matter what. It hasn’t left my sight in ten years, but when I looked this morning, it was gone.’
The sky was growing light, filling the room with pale sunshine. Noticing that Uncle had not returned, and that his bed had not been slept in, Grandpa’s face darkened into a scowl. For a moment, he seemed to forget all about the stolen seal. Then, catching sight of Li Sanren’s shrunken, emaciated body and desperate expression, Grandpa asked: ‘How much money is missing?’
