by Yan Lianke
Grandpa stood dumbstruck. A gust of wind rushed by, leaving his face and clothes smelling strongly of mugwort. The wheat was high, the fields needed water, and the mugwort was in bloom. It was that time again.
‘The thing is, my son and his girl are both healthy,’ Xiaoming’s mother continued. ‘She even showed him a slip from the hospital proving she doesn’t have the fever. But your son and that slut of his don’t have much time left. There’s no way they can out-wait Xiaoming. But if they can get their hands on five thousand yuan, he’ll agree to the divorce in a heartbeat. Then your son can marry the slut, my boy can marry his girl, and everyone will be happy.’
Grandpa remained rooted to his spot. Xiaoming’s mother brushed past him and continued on her way, hobbling off in the direction of the village. As he watched her leave, Grandpa shouted after her: ‘All the books say it’s a bad idea to put fertilizer in the irrigation water. Half of it evaporates, or ends up fertilizing the weeds, or flows into someone else’s field!’
Xiaoming’s mother walked a bit further before she turned and shouted back. ‘Brother-in-law, you used to be a teacher! You ought to be ashamed of yourself, acting as a matchmaker for those two!’
Grandpa stood tethered to the ground, like a useless wooden signpost along an ancient, dried-up river. A gnarled and withered stump surrounded by lush new fields of green.
It was nearly dusk by the time Grandpa located his nephew. Ding Xiaoming had finished irrigating his fields and was lounging along the old river path, relaxing after a hard day’s work. His mother had gone home to make dinner. The sunset stained the plain a deep violet, the colour that happens when red sun, blue sky and green fields collide. A hazy violet light hung over the landscape like steam rising from the soil. When Grandpa arrived, he found his nephew smoking a cigarette beneath a scholar tree on the embankment, exhaling plumes of smoke that turned golden in the rays of the setting sun.
‘Where did you pick up that nasty habit, Xiaoming?’ Grandpa chided. ‘You never used to smoke.’
Xiaoming threw Grandpa a look and turned away his head.
Ignoring the insult, Grandpa squatted down on his heels. ‘Don’t you know that smoking is bad for you?’
Xiaoming took another long drag from his cigarette, as if to prove he knew smoking was bad for him but didn’t care less. ‘Too bad I’m not a bigwig county cadre like your son Ding Hui,’ he said. ‘I bet people give him all kinds of fancy liquor and cigarettes, more than he could ever drink or smoke. So I enjoy a pack of cheap smokes now and then. What do you care?’
Grandpa laughed and sat down next to Xiaoming. ‘I know my boys are good-for-nothings,’ he said with a rueful smile. ‘They’d be better off if someone ran them down with a car. But since that doesn’t seem likely, what can you do? It’s not like I’m allowed to strangle them. Besides, I’m too old for that. I haven’t got the strength.’
Xiaoming smiled. A mocking, thin-lipped smile that seemed tethered to the corners of his mouth by two golden threads. ‘So you just let them go on living the good life, huh? Ding Hui’s life is paradise, and he’s not even sick. Ding Liang’s got his paradise, too, at least until he croaks.’
Grandpa gazed at his nephew in silence. His cheeks were flushed, as if Xiaoming had slapped his face and left two angry red marks. Grandpa lowered his head for a moment, then raised it again, offering it up for another slap.
‘Xiaoming, if you want to take out your anger on someone, take it out on me. Go ahead, hit me. Slap me on both cheeks.’
Xiaoming laughed bitterly. ‘That’s very noble of you, Uncle Ding. Professor Ding. But if I ever laid a finger on you, Ding Hui would probably send his cronies to arrest me, and Ding Liang would pour his blood into my family’s rice cooker and give us all AIDS.’
‘I’d sooner kill myself than let Hui lay a hand on you,’ Grandpa vowed. ‘And if Liang ever dared raise his voice in your presence, I’d chop his head off.’
This time, Xiaoming didn’t laugh or smile. His face was no longer mocking or bitter, but hard and angry, flushed as dark as congealed blood. ‘You certainly know how to talk, Uncle,’ he said quietly. ‘I suppose it comes from all those years of reading books and being a teacher. I always thought you were a reasonable man. But when Liang stole my woman, why didn’t you say something? Why didn’t you try to stop him? You should have given him a good thrashing, or at least a good cursing, instead of letting them move in together like that.’
‘Xiaoming. Be honest with your old uncle.’ Grandpa’s tone was gentle. ‘Deep in your heart, do you really want Lingling back? Do you want to spend the rest of your life with her?’
Xiaoming snorted. ‘I wouldn’t touch that piece of trash again, no matter how desperate I was.’
‘Then why not divorce her and let them be together?’
‘Uncle, since you asked me to be honest, I might as well tell you the truth. I’m engaged to someone. She’s younger than Lingling, prettier and taller, and with lighter skin. She’s educated and classy, and she doesn’t want a penny of my money. All she wants me to do is go to the hospital and take an AIDS test to prove I don’t have the fever, to prove I never sold my blood. She’s going to take one, too. That’s our wedding present to each other. Blood tests. We were supposed to get married this month, but now Lingling and Ding Liang are shacked up together, and everyone in the village knows about it. I even hear they want to get married, make it official and all that, so they can be buried together when they die. Now I don’t feel like getting married right away, because I don’t want to give Lingling a divorce. If she and Ding Liang want to get married, they can wait – they can wait until they’re dead!’
Listening to Xiaoming’s angry, wounded talk, his smug and vengeful words, Grandpa realized that the situation was hopeless. When Xiaoming had finished speaking, Grandpa clambered down the embankment and began walking back towards the school.
The sunset reflected off the sandy soil, flooding the landscape with red. The cries of the season’s first cicadas rose from the plain, a collective buzzing like a chorus of tiny cracked bells off somewhere in the distance. After Grandpa had taken a few slow steps, he turned around and saw Xiaoming rise from the embankment as if he, too, were heading home. Their eyes met, and Grandpa halted. From the way Xiaoming was staring at him, it seemed the young man had something left to say. Grandpa stood and waited for him to speak.
‘Let Liang and Lingling wait,’ Xiaoming shouted. ‘Let them wait until they’re dead! Because that’s the day I’ll get married. When they’re both good and dead!’
Grandpa turned and continued on his way.
Further along, on a sandy shoal that had once been surrounded by water, a stand of mugwort grew as tall as pines. Grandpa was reminded of the pagoda pines and cypresses he’d seen in the city of Kaifeng. Mugwort grew wild all across the plain. In some of the other villages, they called it wormwood. Here was a small forest of it, a cluster of wormwood pagodas covered in a profusion of pale green and yellow leaves.
Grandpa followed the narrow path through the mugwort, displacing clouds of grasshoppers that clung to his shoes, trousers and shirt. He walked slowly, silently, through the last rays of the setting sun. The light had nearly faded, and he was about to turn from the path in the direction of the school, when he heard footsteps behind him. He turned to see Xiaoming a few dozen paces away, running to catch up. Xiaoming was sweating and gasping for breath, his face streaked with sand and dirt that he’d kicked up along the way. When he saw Grandpa turn around, he stopped in his tracks.
‘Hey there, Uncle!’ he shouted.
‘Xiaoming? What are you doing here?’
‘I came to say I’ll give her a divorce. I’ll let them be together, on one condition. You have to agree to it, and so does Ding Liang.’
‘What is it?’
‘First you have to promise.’
‘First tell me what it is.’
‘Well, I’ve thought it over, and I’m willing to give Lingling a divorce, right now, and
let her marry Ding Liang. They want to make it official before they’re dead, right? Well, I can agree to that if Liang promises to write a will saying I’ll get the house and all his property when he’s dead. Once your other son leaves the village, he won’t be coming back, and his house will be empty. His house is nicer than Liang’s, anyway. You can stay in Hui’s house, so you’ll have a place to live in your old age, and Liang can leave his house and property to me.’
On one side of the path was a clump of mugwort; on the other, a deep ditch. Grandpa stood between the two, staring at his nephew, his eyes narrowed to a squint.
‘So what do you say, Uncle? If you agree, I’ll go into town tomorrow and file the divorce papers, and they can go into town the day after and apply for a marriage licence.’
Caught between a ditch and the wormwood, Grandpa continued squinting at his nephew.
‘Did you hear what I said, Uncle? You know the old saying: don’t let your fertilizer flow into a stranger’s field. Keep the wealth in the family, right? It’s better for Ding Liang to will his property to me, his own cousin, than let it go to an outsider like Song Tingting. Or worse, let the government get their hands on it.’
Ditch. Wormwood. Nephew. Grandpa caught between them, squinting.
‘When you think about it, Uncle, it makes perfect sense. What does Hui need with his stuff once he’s dead? He can’t take it with him. That’s what you should tell him. Besides, it’s not like I’m going to be using it while he’s still alive. I won’t move into the house until he and Lingling are both gone. But he’s got to promise to put it in his will. Otherwise, I won’t give Lingling a divorce, and they’ll never be able to get married. If he dies without making an honest woman of her, that’s something he’s going to take to his grave.’
In that moment, Grandpa’s vision blurred, turning what was left of the sunset – a sheet of red and gold – into a haze of blood and fog. Grass and trees, wormwood and brush, mugwort and sedge swam before his eyes, swirled around his feet and spun off into the distance. Even his nephew seemed to have receded, and was now a tiny spinning blur . . .
‘I’ve got to go.’ The voice sounded far away. ‘But you tell Liang about what I said, and tell him to think it over. After all, how many happy days do any of us have? You come into this world with nothing, and you leave the same way. You can’t take it with you. All you can do is enjoy it while you can. Happiness . . . that’s the only thing that’s real.’
With these words of wisdom, Xiaoming took his leave. He sauntered down the road and disappeared into the setting sun, leaving the wormwood and the ditch far behind him.
3
On the far reaches of the plain, along the western horizon, trees and villages seemed immobilized against the sunset, as static as drawings on a sheet of paper. The banks of the ancient Yellow River, now just worn-down sand dunes, were covered with patchy vegetation. Where they faced the sun, the grass grew tall, but where they lay in shadow, the surface was bare, the sandy soil encrusted like a scab over an old wound. The tops of the embankments were uniformly bald, their sand-strewn pates reflecting sunlight like gold. The thick, sweet stench of sun-baked soil and wild grass spread like molasses over the plain. At dusk, the plain was like a vast lake of salt-sweet warmth, a body of water stretching endlessly and giving off a moist, sweet stink.
A lonely goat wandered towards the village from the direction of the school, its thin bleating causing ripples in the silence like a reed floating on the surface of a lake. A man led his cattle in single file back to the village after having taken them out to graze. Their mooing echoed through the fields, their bodies like a field of mud advancing slowly across the plain and into the dusk.
A man stood on the outskirts of the village and shouted to his neighbour working in the fields.
‘Hey there! Are you busy tomorrow?’
‘Not really. Why?’
‘My dad died, and I was hoping you could help me bury him.’
There was a moment of silence. Then the man in the fields asked: ‘When did he die?’
‘Earlier today.’
‘Have you got a coffin?’
‘Yes, Yuejin and Genzhu gave us one of the willow trees.’
‘What about the funeral clothes?’
‘My mother has had them ready for a while.’
‘All right, then. I’ll come over early tomorrow morning.’
And the plain fell silent again, as still as a lake on a windless day.
4
I, Ding Liang, being of sound mind and body, agree to give Ding Xiaoming all my property after Xia Lingling and I have passed away. Ding Xiaoming is to inherit the house, courtyard, trees and all the items in the house, as well as the half-acre of irrigated farmland located north of the old river path between the Zhang and Wang family fields. The main property consists of one three-room house of brick and tile, two adjacent buildings (a kitchen and a storeroom), and a courtyard with three paulownia trees and two cottonwoods, which Xia Lingling and I promise not to cut down or sell during our lifetimes. Household items and furnishings include one standing wardrobe, one long table, two wooden trunks, one coat rack, one washstand, four red-lacquered chairs, five stools, two benches, one double bed, one single bed, two large water vats and four clay storage jars. Xia Lingling and I pledge not to sell, give away, destroy, damage or remove any of these items from the premises.
As my verbal agreement with Ding Xiaoming is not legally binding, I have written down the terms of our agreement in this letter, which should be considered my last will and testament. I entrust this document to my younger cousin Ding Xiaoming, until such time as it becomes effective after my and Lingling’s deaths. My father, Ding Shuiyang, is not to contest this will or otherwise lay claim to any of my property.
Signed: Ding Liang
On the *th day of the *th month of the year 19**
5
When Uncle went to Ding Xiaoming’s house to deliver the letter, his last will and testament, they met at the courtyard gate. Uncle stood outside, unwilling to set foot in an enemy courtyard; his cousin stood just inside the gate, unwilling to step outside, into unprotected territory.
‘There! Take it!’ said Uncle, flinging the letter in Xiaoming’s face.
It fluttered to the ground and Xiaoming bent down to pick it up. After he had scanned the contents, he said: ‘Cousin, you’re the one who stole my wife.’ He sounded wounded. ‘You’ve got no call to treat me like this.’
CHAPTER FOUR
1
Uncle and Lingling got married. They had made it official: they were husband and wife. Now, finally, they could move into Uncle’s house.
On the day of the move, they borrowed a cart, and in two trips, managed to move everything from the threshing ground back to the village. By the time they arrived at Uncle’s house, Lingling was perspiring heavily. But there was still work to be done: there were quilts and kitchenware and furniture and boxes to be unloaded and arranged in the house. By the time they had put everything in order, Lingling was drenched in sweat. She stripped off some of her clothes and went outside to take the air. Her sweating subsided, but by evening she began to feel parched and feverish again, as if her whole body were burning up. Thinking she was coming down with a cold, Lingling took some medicine and a draught of ginger tea, but neither brought down her fever.
A fortnight later, she realized what was happening.
It wasn’t a fever, but the fever. Her disease was full-blown. She was dying.
She hadn’t a bit of strength left in her body. She didn’t have the energy to eat, or even to lift a bowl. One day, Uncle made her some ginger tea to help bring down her fever, but when he raised the bowl to her lips, she refused to drink it. She stared in alarm at his gaunt face and the several new spots that had appeared on his forehead.
‘When did you get those spots on your face?’ she asked.
‘Don’t worry, I’m fine.’
‘Take off your clothes.’
‘I’m fine,�
� said Uncle, with his usual careless grin.
‘If that’s true,’ Lingling raised her voice, ‘then take off your clothes and show me!’
As Uncle removed his shirt and loosened his trousers, Lingling saw the angry rash of red bumps that stretched around his midriff. The blisters were fierce and shiny, as if they were bursting with blood. Uncle had stopped wearing his leather belt because it chafed the rash, and had instead replaced it with a long, cloth sash threaded through the belt loops of his trousers. Lingling hadn’t noticed the sash before, because Uncle had always been careful to cover it with his shirt. Now, with the ends of the sash dangling from his waist, Uncle looked like one of those old-time peasant-farmers who tied their trousers with whatever bit of cloth they could find.
As she gazed at the rash on Uncle’s waist, Lingling’s eyes filled with tears. Then, despite her tears, she began to laugh.
‘It’s probably better this way,’ she said, chuckling. ‘That both of our fevers have flared up at the same time. Just a few days ago, I was worried that I’d die first, and you’d end up getting back together with Tingting.’
Uncle, too, began to laugh. ‘I was afraid to tell you, but my fever flared up first. The day I stopped wearing my belt, I thought, “Oh God, please let Lingling’s fever get worse, too. Don’t let me drop dead and leave her here, alive and well.”’
Uncle smiled, a wicked smile. Lingling reached out and gave him a little pinch.
‘I haven’t touched you in weeks,’ said Uncle, setting the bowl of ginger tea on the bedside table. ‘It’s been weeks since we did anything in bed. Didn’t you notice, and think my fever was getting worse?’
Lingling shook her head and smiled. After that, they had a lot to talk about.
‘Well, isn’t this great?’ said Lingling. ‘The minute we move into the house, we both get sick.’
‘If we have to die soon, at least we’ll die together.’
‘I hope I’m the first to go, so you can give me a nice funeral. But you have to promise to buy me some decent clothes. I don’t want to be buried in one of those horrible black funeral outfits. I want a dress – no, two dresses, one bright red. Ever since I was small, I’ve loved bright red. As for the other one – something plain, a lighter colour. That way, I’ll have a change of clothes in the afterlife.’
