by Yan Lianke
‘You’re no better than he is,’ Grandpa said angrily, and got up to leave.
But trouble had arrived at the school. Trouble had arrived on his doorstep. As Grandpa stepped into the main room, he saw Uncle’s wife standing at the door.
When their eyes met, they both froze in their tracks, like two speeding drivers screeching to a halt just before impact. Only silently.
Grandpa saw that Tingting’s normally rosy complexion was slightly off colour. He immediately understood what had happened, and understood what was about to happen. Uncle, cowering behind him, must have understood it too, because he shrank back into the inner room and shut the door behind him.
Grandpa turned around and hollered, ‘Liang! Come out and apologize to your wife!’
Not a peep, not a sound from inside the room. It might as well have been empty.
Grandpa was enraged. ‘You miserable excuse for a son! Get your arse out here and tell your wife you’re sorry!’
This time, not only did Uncle refuse to come out, he barred and locked the door.
Grandpa walked over to the sturdy willow door and began kicking at it, pounding it with his feet. When it wouldn’t open, he picked up a wooden stool and raised it over his head, ready to smash in the door. But at that moment, something caused him to reverse his course. It was Tingting, stepping over the threshold and telling him gently: ‘Dad, stop.’
With those two words, his rage seemed to dissipate, like floodwaters receding, or the disappearing tail of a cyclone. He turned to see Tingting standing in the middle of the room, the anger fading from her face, her colour returning to normal. When she was calm and composed, she glanced at the locked and bolted door, tucked an errant strand of hair behind her ear and said: ‘Don’t bother calling him, Dad. He’s too much of a coward to answer.’
Grandpa stood motionless, still holding the stool over his head.
‘It’s probably better this way,’ Tingting continued evenly. ‘I’ve never done anything to let your family down. I can get divorced, move back to my hometown, and not have to worry about him infecting me or Xiao Jun.’
Grandpa lowered the stool slowly, very slowly, until it hung limply at his side, like a puppet tethered by a string.
There was an awkward pause. Tingting blushed a deep crimson, licked her dry lips and said, ‘I’m taking Xiao Jun with me. If you want to see your grandson, you’re welcome to visit him at my parents’ house. But if Ding Liang shows up, I’ll have my brothers break his legs.’
Then Tingting turned and left the room. She left before Grandpa had a chance to answer.
Uncle’s wife was gone.
5
After Jia Genzhu returned from the village, he and Ding Yuejin closeted themselves in an empty classroom. When they emerged a while later, they went off in search of Ding Shuiyang, otherwise known as Professor Ding. To me, he was always just Grandpa.
Tingting was gone by the time they arrived at Grandpa’s rooms, but the crowd of onlookers had not dispersed.
‘Move along now, go home,’ Genzhu told them. ‘There’s nothing to see here.’
The villagers, who hadn’t heard about the school coup, seemed confused by Jia Genzhu’s authoritative tone: he spoke like he was a party official.
Ding Yuejin, standing at Genzhu’s side, took it upon himself to explain. ‘You heard the man. From now on, he’ll be making the decisions around here. Genzhu and I are in charge of the school.’
And with that, the two men walked into Grandpa’s rooms. ‘Professor, we’ve got something else we’d like to discuss with you,’ said Ding Yuejin, with a smile.
Jia Genzhu, unsmiling, handed Grandpa a piece of notepaper bearing the official village seal. It was very much like the piece of paper he’d handed him earlier at the gate, but the words were different, the message more alarming. It read:
After a thorough investigation into the matter, we hereby revoke Ding Shuiyang’s credentials as a teacher and caretaker of stuff at the Ding Village Elementary School. From this day forward, Comrade Ding Shuiyang is not an employee of Ding Village Elementary School, and may not meddle in any matter to do with the school.
Below this, Ding Yuejin and Jia Genzhu had affixed their signatures and the date. Grandpa skimmed the order once, glanced up in disbelief, then read it again more carefully, his wrinkled face twitching with annoyance. He thought about crumpling the paper into a ball and throwing it in their faces, until he noticed several young men standing behind them: Jia Hongli, Jia Sangen, Ding Sanzi and Ding Xiaoyue. All were close relatives of either Genzhu or Yuejin, young men in their late twenties or early thirties who had recently come down with the fever. Some stood with arms crossed, others leaned against the doorway, sneering at Grandpa as if he were a personal enemy who they had cornered at last.
‘You’re trying to get rid of me?’ asked Grandpa.
‘It’s clear that you’re not fit to run this school any more,’ said Genzhu. ‘Your older son milked us of our blood, then he sold off our coffins. I hear he’s selling coffins belonging to other villages now. And your younger son is no better: he’s got the fever and he comes to this school and starts fooling around with another man’s wife, his cousin’s wife, no less. Ding Shuiyang, you were a teacher . . . don’t you know that that’s considered incest?’
‘So, you tell me,’ Genzhu continued, ‘do you still think you deserve to be in charge of this school?’
Then he proclaimed: ‘Starting today, you are no longer a teacher or caretaker at this school, so stop trying to tell everyone what to do.’
Grandpa stood silently in the centre of the room. He felt himself wilting, as if the muscle and bone had been stripped from his body. For a moment, it seemed as if he might collapse, but he dug in his heels and forced himself to stand his ground.
Later that evening, the lights in most of the classrooms were still burning, but the little building beside the school gate lay in darkness. The darkness was impenetrable, as if the two rooms were trapped beneath an avalanche of black stones. Grandpa and Uncle, caught between the crevices, hunkered in the inner room. Grandpa sat slumped, his face and hands wet with tears. Uncle lay on his bed, gazing out of the window at the night. He could feel the darkness bearing down upon him, pressing on his chest, making it difficult to breathe.
The atmosphere was oppressive, unbearably so.
‘Son,’ Grandpa said. ‘You’ve got to go home.’
‘Why?’
‘You’ve got to go and see Tingting, and talk her out of leaving.’
Uncle thought it over for a while and decided Grandpa was right. He had to go home.
Even this late at night, there was a crowd of people at the school gate. Jia Genzhu, his brother Genbao and their cousins Jia Hongli and Jia Sangen were still loading school desks on to carts. The cook, Zhao Xiuqin, also seemed to be helping. Uncle couldn’t hear what they were saying, but they seemed to be talking about Genbao’s upcoming wedding. Their laughter and conversation swirled through the schoolyard like muddy water down a dry riverbed, after an unexpected rainstorm.
Uncle listened for a while before coughing to announce his presence. The talk and laughter died down, and Uncle stepped through the school gate and began walking home.
When he arrived at his house, he was alarmed to see the padlock hanging from the front gate. Frantically, he groped around the edges of the wooden gate until he found two keys hidden in a crack. He opened the padlock, raced through the courtyard, unlocked the door of the house and turned on the light. He found the main room little changed, but for a layer of dust on his mother’s photograph and on the family’s ancestral shrine. He spied a heap of his unwashed shirts and trousers on a bench against the wall. Moving into the bedroom, he threw open the red wooden wardrobe and saw that Tingting and Xiao Jun’s clothes were missing. He fumbled around in a corner of the wardrobe for the money and the red bank-book that he usually kept hidden there. When he came up empty-handed, Uncle realized that Tingting had left him for good. His family was
broken, his wife and son gone.
If I die tomorrow, Uncle thought, they’ll find me with two tears in my eyes: one for every good thing that I’ve lost.
CHAPTER THREE
1
It happened just like Jia Genzhu said it would: Uncle’s marriage was ruined, his wife and child gone, his family destroyed. It was the latest in a series of calamities to hit Ding Village.
Ruin had come early this year, with the spring.
The plain was a thick carpet of green. In the fields, the new crop of wheat was raising its head, and the soil, which had lain dormant all winter, now turned its energy to growth. Rich or poor soil alike was fertile enough at this time of year to nourish the young wheat and allow it to thrive. It would be at least another fortnight, or perhaps another month, before the relative wealth or paucity of the soil began to show. By mid-spring, when the nutrients in the sandy topsoil had been exhausted, some of the plants would become emaciated, thin and pale. But now, in the first few weeks of spring, everything was lush and green.
Grasses and wild flowers lined the roadsides, sprouting from gaps between fields and invading plots of untilled land. They grew madly, uncontrollably . . . blooms of red and white, yellow and purple, sandwiched between rectangles of green like a calico print. Red stood out bold and strong against a blur of pale yellow and smudges of green. The plain was a patchwork of colour, a world in disarray, growing free and wild. Even the solitary trees had burst into life: new leaves budded from their branches, gently swaying in the breeze. It was like the whole plain was bursting into song.
Beyond the fields was the ancient path of the Yellow River, a silted, sand-strewn channel that had lain dry for centuries, perhaps millennia. A thousand yards wide at its broadest point, a hundred at its narrowest, it snaked across the Central Plain for miles and miles. No one knew its exact length: to the villagers, it seemed as boundless as the sky. A sandy swathe that lay several feet below the level of the plain, it was like a broad grey belt pulled tight around the midriff of the earth, an enduring reminder of a river defeated by time. Now that spring had turned the sandy belt to green, filling it with vegetation, the channel was indistinguishable from the landscape around it. The plain had turned into a level playing field, a vast flatness of green.
Green earth. Green sky. Green villages. All the world had become lush and green.
The wheels of industry, too, had awakened with the spring. The residents of Ding Village elementary school bustled around as if they had miraculously returned to full health, carting items from the school back to their homes. Jia Genzhu and Ding Yuejin had divided the school property among the residents: desks and chairs and blackboards, chests and washstands, beds and bedding once used in the teachers’ quarters, crossbeams and rafters and scavenged planks of wood.
Uncle had returned to the village, to his own house. Tingting, who had gone back to her hometown to stay with her mother, sent word that she didn’t want to see Uncle again as long as she lived. Or as long as he lived. The next time they met, she said, she hoped he’d be lying in a coffin. Once he was dead, she would come back to the village to sell the house and collect the furniture. And so Uncle had no choice but to leave the school and move back into his house, to keep an eye on the property and possessions that would be sold or taken after his death.
Grandpa was no longer the caretaker of the school. No longer did anyone regard him as a caretaker, or treat him as a teacher. He was just an old man from the village who happened to live in the school. Disconnected from the residents, he took no part in their meals or medicines, conversations or chess games, or the ups and downs of their disease. Nor did anyone show him much respect. Although he still lived beside the main gate, few residents passing through gave him so much as a nod. If they did deign to greet him, it was only because he had greeted them first. If someone did nod his way, he returned the greeting eagerly. As for what was being said or done inside the classrooms, as for what the several dozen residents said or did in their spare time, it had absolutely nothing to do with him. He was lucky that they let him live in the school at all.
Once, as one of the residents, a spotty young man in his early twenties, was coming through the gate, Grandpa asked him: ‘Now that Genzhu’s little brother is married, did he ever return those desks he borrowed?’
‘You mean Chairman Jia? No one calls him Genzhu any more.’
Grandpa stared at the man, speechless.
‘Didn’t you know? Uncle Jia and Uncle Ding are our new chairmen.’
The young man continued into the schoolyard, leaving Grandpa speechless at the gate, gawping like a rejected traveller at a border crossing. The school was a different country, and Grandpa was no longer a citizen.
Then the next day, at dusk, as the sun faded from a brilliant yellow to a pale, washed-up pink, Zhao Xiuqin had returned from the village carrying a bamboo basket filled with cabbages, carrots, rice noodles, two fish, several pounds of meat and a bottle of liquor. The meat looked to be the freshest, finest cut of pork; the label on the bottle read ‘Song River Sorghum’, the best local sorghum whisky money could buy. Even unopened, the bottle gave off a powerful fragrance. As Zhao Xiuqin passed through the gate, Grandpa smiled benevolently and said: ‘Aha . . . we’re moving up in the world, I see.’
The cook beamed. ‘Yes, I’m making dinner for Chairman Jia and Chairman Ding tonight.’
Grandpa was confused. ‘So that meat isn’t for everyone?’
‘Chairman Jia and Chairman Ding managed to get us some government funding,’ the cook explained, ‘so we thought we’d all pitch in and make them a nice meal. You know, to thank them.’
It was only then that Grandpa realized Jia Genzhu and Ding Yuejin had been appointed co-chairmen of the Ding Village task torce on HIV and AIDS, thus the elevated titles. There was a new social order in the school, a new pecking order. It wasn’t so different from the periodic political reshufflings in village, county, district or provincial government; there had been a changing of the guard, and nothing would be the same. Grandpa couldn’t help but feel bitter, somehow impoverished. But since the lives of the sick villagers seemed to be less so, there was really nothing he could say. He had no authority, nothing to do and no one to lead.
He woke the next morning, still feeling useless and idle. After loitering at the gate for a while, he decided to take a walk around the outside of the school. He strolled along like a man making a circuit of his own property, admiring the early spring foliage that covered the exterior of the school wall. When he reached the gate again, Grandpa found a crowd of people busily carting things out of the school.
Some had two classroom desks hanging from either end of a shoulder pole, while others struggled under the weight of large blackboards. Some worked in pairs to carry away heavy crossbeams, while others worked in groups of three or four, pushing carts laden with beds taken from the teachers’ quarters. Sweating from their exertions, faces beaming with excitement, the residents of the school were carrying their trophies back to their homes in the village. It was just like Grandpa had imagined in his dream: a flower-filled early spring, gold growing from the soil, a village hurrying its treasure home . . .
As they bustled around, the residents eyed one another’s items and compared notes on who had got what:
‘Your desk is better than mine . . . the wood’s much thicker.’
‘If you sell that plank of elm, it’ll be worth a lot more than this paulownia.’
‘You got a bed made of chestnut? All I got was one made of toon.’
The metal gates of the school opened like a sluice, releasing a flood of villagers. Grandpa, wondering what had happened, quickened his pace and caught up with Jia Hongli, a younger cousin of Jia Genzhu. Despite his illness, the young man was carrying a shoulder pole laden with three shiny classroom desks.
‘What’s going on here?’ Grandpa demanded.
Jia Hongli gave Grandpa a sideways glance. ‘If you want to know what’s going on,’ he huffed, ‘why don’t
you go and ask your son Ding Hui?’
The young man stalked off with his cargo of desks, like a tiny mountain goat trying to drag a mountain home to graze. Still confused, Grandpa stood at the gate until he saw another resident approaching, struggling under the weight of an enormous blackboard. Grandpa couldn’t see the man’s face, but he recognized the blackboard by the nail sticking out of one corner. It was a favourite from his substitute-teaching days: a large chalkboard set in a fine-grained elm-wood frame, with a smooth glossy surface that chalk seemed to glide across. For convenience, Grandpa had placed a nail in the lower right-hand corner so that he could hang a piece of cloth for wiping the board. Now the blackboard was inching across the schoolyard, covering the man’s back like the shell of a snail.
As the man reached the gate, Grandpa lifted the chalkboard from his back and forced it to the ground. Zhao Dequan emerged from underneath with a sheepish grin. ‘Oh, Professor Ding . . .’ he said nervously.
‘So it’s you!’ Grandpa shook his head. ‘Planning to teach classes in your house now, are you?’
Zhao Dequan glanced around in alarm to make sure no one was within earshot.
‘I had no choice but to take it,’ he explained. ‘Chairman Jia and Chairman Ding gave us these things, and everyone has collected theirs. If I refused, it would look bad, and everyone would be offended, including the chairmen.’
Zhao Dequan turned to look behind him. Seeing that the schoolyard was empty, he told Grandpa: ‘If you can’t bear to part with this blackboard, I’ll help you hide it in your room. Just don’t tell anyone I gave it you.’
‘What were you planning to do with it, anyway?’ asked Grandpa, stroking the blackboard.
‘Use it for my coffin, of course,’ Zhao Dequan answered, a smile playing on his face. ‘Everyone says your son Ding Hui has been selling off the free government coffins that were supposed to go to all the villages in these parts. Now the chairmen are making it up to us by giving everyone enough wood to build a coffin.’
