by Yan Lianke
A cold, dark stench of decay hung in the air.
As Grandpa stood at the entrance to the burial chamber, he remembered a bit of doggerel he’d heard as a child. It was an old folk saying here on the plain, a truism passed from generation to generation:
When graves are robbed of treasure,
there’s not enough treasure to go around.
When graves are robbed of coffins,
there are too many coffins to be found.
VOLUME 7
CHAPTER ONE
1
It was a summer of drought. Drought swept across the plain like fire. The heat of too many suns in the sky.
By late August, the height of summer, the plain hadn’t seen a drop of rain in nearly five months. The last rainfall had been in early April. At first, the farmers, unaware of the drought, had diverted water to their fields any way they could. They dug deep irrigation wells and used diesel engines from tractors to pump even more water from the earth. By June and July, the wheat was in ear, the cottonwoods were in bloom, and there was no moisture left in the ground. With no nearby rivers to draw from, the soil was parched.
The wheat had grown knee-high, but as the drought wore on, it turned brittle and dry. In the early days of the drought, the young plants woke refreshed and green, nourished by the moist night air. Now morning found them looking soggy, as if their leaves and spines had wilted overnight. When the sun burst from the eastern horizon and roared into the sky, the plants were dry, their leaves brittle under the burning sun, and their heads drooped, crumbling at the slightest touch. With each gust of wind, chalky dust rose from the scorched earth and swirled across the plain. A stench of something burning filled the air.
The plain was as pale as ashes, as far as the eye could see.
The leaves on the trees withered and curled. The scholar trees, whose shallow roots couldn’t absorb enough moisture from the soil, began shedding yellow leaves, as if autumn had come early. The deep-rooted elms remained green, but they attracted legions of insects. The whole insect kingdom converged on their branches and leaves. Small green worms, spotted ladybirds and yellow beetles turned the elms into private fiefdoms, marching up and down the branches, munching on the stems and leaves.
Insects that hung from branches were liable to drop. If you passed below an elm, you could feel them plopping on your head.
The trees that once shaded the village were gone. Now, if you stood beneath a tree, you could feel sunlight on your face. The village, once green, was barren. It blended into the landscape.
Crops died in the fields. Grass withered on the plain. The soil was bleached, as far as the eye could see.
The last survivors stood out, pale yellow patches in a sea of bleach.
Some of the trees, still alive but unable to support so many leaves, had thinned their foliage so that only the trunk and roots remained. The drought-resistant cicadas, however, were thriving, multiplying, buzzing day and night. By day, their cries were everywhere, like chilli peppers spread out to dry in the sun. By night, their cries were sparser, hanging from the branches like grapevines on an arbour.
When the sun rose every morning, the branches of trees gleamed with cicadas, their wings and bodies glinting golden yellow in the sunlight. All day long, a burnt stench hung over the plain. Dark plumes of smoke rose from the ground. At sunset, the smoke vanished, and the plain turned to fire. By nightfall, everything was ashes.
You looked forward to the end of each day, but the next one always came too soon. The sun rushed in while you were still slumbering in your bed, exhausted from the night before. The early evening was too hot for sleep, so it was only after midnight that you found some rest. But as soon as your head hit the pillow, the sun was up again, crawling through the doors and windows, warming your blankets, stroking your body and tickling your face. If you tried to ignore it, if you tried to roll over and go back to sleep, you were sure to be awakened by a disturbance of a different kind: footsteps ringing through the streets, sounds outside your window, a knock on your door and a voice telling you that someone else in the village had died.
‘Uncle, you’ve got to come and help. My mother’s gone. She died early this morning.’
‘Sorry, brother, but I need to call in that favour. When your family needed help, I came and worked for three days. Now we need your help, but it’s only for one day.’
And so another day began, another day of scorched earth.
Fire rolled across the plain.
A hundred thousand suns, burning up the sky.
2
It was a summer of fever. Fever swept the plain, just like everyone said it would.
Winter and summer had always been seasons of death, when freezing-cold temperatures or sweltering heat claimed the most sick and elderly lives. Old-timers on the plain said that all the Qing dynasty emperors had died either in the depths of winter or the height of summer. But for those in Ding Village, those already sick with the fever, this would be the summer that they died. Having lived through the winter, they had expected to survive another year, but the drought proved too much for them. The heat was too extreme. The sun cremated the earth, raising purple smoke from the soil. The air scalded people’s throats and raised blisters on their lungs.
Wheat died and grass withered. The last remaining leaves curled up and died.
On the east side of Ding Village, the Zhao family lost their daughter-in-law. She died at the age of twenty-nine, just a few days after coming down with a fever. Burned alive and parched to death, she left behind a three-year-old son.
On the west side of Ding Village, forty-year-old Mr Jia had always been careful about his health. He knew that he had the fever, and that his body had lost its ability to fight back, so he was always on guard against colds and flu, cuts and bruises. He was meticulous about what he ate, and avoided anything that might make him ill or upset his stomach. But it was a trip to the latrine that did him in. He had walked through the blazing sun and squatted in the cool shade of the latrine, but the combination of extreme temperatures caused him to catch cold. For a few days, he had a runny nose and a slight headache. Then his nose stopped running, but his fever flared up, and left him with a raging headache. Unable to stand the pain, he smashed his head against a wall and died.
They found him lying in a pool of blood, with his brains bashed in.
In the village centre, a pretty young girl who had married outside the village was visiting her family. Little Min had been feeling fine, but a few days into her visit, her whole body broke out in an itchy, angry rash. Without a tear or a word of complaint, she told her parents she’d stayed long enough, and that it was time to go back to her husband’s house. Then she packed up her things and left. She was halfway home when she hung herself from the branch of a persimmon tree.
Ding Zuizui, known to everyone as ‘the Mouth’, died because of a story. One day, as he was standing at the crossroads talking to another villager, a man who also had the fever, the Mouth started telling this story:
‘Once there was a minor official who got a big promotion, so he went home to his wife and told her to make him a feast to celebrate. After she’d warmed the wine, cooked the food and laid it on the table, she asked her husband: “Now that you’re a big official, does that mean your thing is bigger, too?” “Sure,” he said. “I’m bigger all over.” But later that night, when they were in bed, she noticed that his thing was as tiny as ever. “If you’re such a big official, how come it feels so small?” she asked. So the man explained that when an official gets a promotion, so does his wife. “My thing’s a lot bigger now,” he told her, “but so is yours, which is probably why you couldn’t tell . . . Your thing’s too huge!”’
When the Mouth had finished, he threw his head back and roared with laughter. It was an old joke, one of his favourites. But the other man didn’t even smile. He went home, grabbed a kitchen cleaver, and came back to confront the Mouth.
‘Everyone is fucking dying and you’re still making
jokes?’ the man shouted. ‘What the hell are you so happy about all the time? If you want to laugh, go laugh in your grave!’
The man attacked the Mouth with the cleaver, chopping until he was dead.
People were dying in droves. They were dying like dogs, or chickens, or ants crushed underfoot. There was no wailing or crying or pasting up of funeral scrolls. People were buried the same day they died. Coffins were prepared in advance, and graves were dug while a person was still alive. With the weather so hot, if you waited a day to dig the grave, the body would start to rot, so coffins and graves were kept on standby for speedy burials.
By the time the fever erupted, the sick villagers weren’t living in the elementary school. They had left the school and gone back to their homes.
The reason they left had nothing to do with the fever, and everything to do with a decision by the higher-ups to cancel their food subsidy. Their monthly subsidies of grain and cooking oil had been revoked. They found out about it only after a few of the younger residents went into the county to pick up the goods and returned at noon, empty-handed.
‘Ding Village isn’t getting any more help from the government,’ one of the young men announced. ‘They said we’re not getting anything from now on, not even a pound of flour.’
Jia Genzhu, Ding Yuejin and the other residents were outside relaxing in the shade, clustered around a television set they had rigged up in the schoolyard. When they heard the news, they stopped watching television and turned to stare.
‘Why would they do that?’ someone asked.
‘Because they think we’re the ones who broke into Ding Liang and Lingling’s tomb and stole their coffins. That’s why they’re pulling the plug.’
All eyes turned to Jia Genzhu and Ding Yuejin. Everyone knew that the order must have come from my father, because he suspected the pair of robbing his brother’s grave. The residents of the school were counting on their two chairmen to go and talk to my father and straighten things out, to tell him that they had nothing to do with the grave-robbing and coffin-filching. But the two men exchanged a guilty look and said nothing.
Several days later, everyone moved out of the school and returned to their homes.
On the day of the move, Grandpa was working in his vegetable patch near the school gate. It was a tiny plot, the size of a few straw mats, behind the back wall of his house, right next to my grave. Using two buckets on a shoulder pole, he drew water from the school well and brought it back to the plot where he grew leeks, chives and miniature cabbage. The water was quickly swallowed up by the thirsty soil. It was like pouring water into a ravine, or into the sand dunes of the dried-up Yellow River path. Before the drought, four trips to the well had been enough to water his tiny garden, but now it needed seven trips, carrying fourteen buckets of water.
He had just finished watering his plot when he noticed Jia Genzhu and about a dozen residents of the school standing by the gate, watching him. They carried bedrolls and suitcases, bowls and chopsticks, fans and straw mats and assorted belongings. All of them were staring at him as if he were the man personally responsible for taking away their food subsidy and driving them from the school. All eyes were on Grandpa, accusing him.
But as he stood in the vegetable patch with his empty buckets, staring back into that sea of faces, Grandpa seemed less intimidated than before. Maybe he’d let them down in the past, but they’d let him down, too. He’d once been in their debt, but now he owed them nothing. Maybe they’d once been friends, but now they were like strangers from another village, and he had nothing to say to them. Grandpa knew that some of the residents – not just one or two of them, but many – had broken into his son’s grave. They’d destroyed a tomb and stolen two coffins, the likes of which hadn’t been seen around here for 100 years, and wouldn’t been seen for another 100. But that was fine with him, because it meant that they were even. The debt he owed Ding Village had been repaid in full.
Now he could face the villagers. He could view them as they viewed him. With cold, silent stares.
Jia Genzhu ended the standoff by spitting on the ground, like he was trying to dislodge something from his throat. Then he led his people away.
As they walked towards the village, they kept turning around to throw dirty looks at Grandpa. Their looks seemed to say that Grandpa owed them, that he was still in their debt, and that a plundering of his son’s grave wasn’t enough to set the accounts straight. They had something coming to them, and they wanted payback. Grandpa stood in his vegetable plot, thinking about those dirty looks and wondering what they meant. What more did they want from him? What else could he do? After they’d desecrated his son’s grave, he hadn’t complained or accused or said a single nasty word. Wasn’t that enough for them? What more did they want?
Grandpa was about to head back to the well for more water when he saw Ding Yuejin, the last to leave, trudging through the gate with his luggage.
‘Hi, Uncle. Watering your garden?’
Grandpa decided to skip the small talk. ‘When your cousin Liang’s grave was robbed, I didn’t raise a fuss in the village. I never said a single word. What more do you people want from me? Are you trying to drive me to my death?’
Ding Yuejin, now standing face to face with Grandpa, set down his luggage and thought for a moment.
‘Ding Liang was a good man,’ he said slowly. ‘But that brother of his is another story. First he steals our coffins, then he cancels our food subsidy. What makes him think we had anything to do with robbing his brother’s grave? But even if we did, that doesn’t change a thing. It doesn’t mean Ding Hui is a good man.’
Ding Yuejin squinted at Grandpa through the bright sunshine. ‘Do you know what he’s doing now? He’s arranging marriages for people who died of the fever. First they put him in charge of coffins and food subsidies, and now he’s the matchmaker for every dead person in the county! I hear he gets 200 yuan for every match he makes. Just think about all the people who have the fever, and about all the boys and girls who’ll die before they can get married. Can you imagine how much money he stands to make, before this is all over? It should have been Ding Hui who died, not his brother.’
Ding Yuejin picked up his luggage, brushed past Grandpa and began walking towards the village. As Grandpa watched him leave, it dawned on him why the residents of the school had been so hostile, and why they had given him such dirty looks. Dropping his buckets and shoulder pole, Grandpa raced after his nephew, shouting: ‘Yuejin! Yuejin! Was it true, what you said?’
Ding Yuejin turned around. ‘If you don’t believe me, go and ask him yourself!’
He continued on his way, leaving Grandpa standing in the middle of the road beneath the blazing sunshine, like a small clay figure of a man that someone had left to dry in the sun. Like an old wooden hitching post bleached by the sunshine, a piece of rotting wood that no one wanted any more.
3
Although Grandpa kept meaning to go into the city and visit my parents and sister, he never did. He couldn’t seem to bring himself to make the trip. Then again, maybe he just didn’t want to face my dad.
Instead, he spent his days in the elementary school. The school was deserted now, and the classrooms were bare. The desks, chairs and blackboards were gone. The tables and wooden planks that had served as beds were also missing, carted off by the former residents. Every tree in the schoolyard, from the biggest to the smallest, had been chopped down. The villagers had even taken the windowpanes.
Not a day went by without someone showing up with a letter authorizing them to remove certain items from the school. The letters always bore the official village seal and the signatures of Jia Genzhu and Ding Yuejin. When everything had been taken, Grandpa found himself the caretaker of an empty schoolhouse, a deserted schoolyard and his own two small rooms. With nothing to watch over and nothing left to do, Grandpa got bored. He talked about visiting my dad in the city, but somehow, he never did. The days were as empty as his heart, which seemed to have left h
is body, in the same way that his youngest son had left this life. It felt like everything he’d ever loved had died. Although my dad was still alive and well and living comfortably in the big city, it made no difference to Grandpa. In his mind, his eldest son was already dead.
He felt the same way about Ding Village.
For him, the village had ceased to exist.
With no desire to see any of the villagers, Grandpa spent his days in the elementary school. The school was as empty and silent as it had been a year ago. All the people were gone. There were no teachers or students or sick residents. The two-acre campus held but one living soul. Now that Grandpa was alone, he could go to bed as early as he liked and sleep as late as he wanted. He could eat when he was hungry, drink when he was thirsty, empty his bowl or leave leftovers, to stretch one meal into two. And if he didn’t bother to wash the pot he’d cooked in, who cared? No one would ever know. What did it matter if his face was unwashed? No one would ever see it.
The idleness began to weigh on him. Grandpa felt as if he were living on the fringes of the world, rather than inside it. Every so often, cries and wailing from the village informed him that someone else had died, but he never bothered to find out who it might be. What concern was it of his, if another person vanished from this world?
When he saw a funeral procession leaving the village or passing by the school, he would stand and watch for a few moments before returning to whatever he’d been doing.
Not that there was anything to do but weed and water his garden, or stand and watch it grow. When he had rid his tiny plot of weeds and pests, the only thing left was to wait for more to appear.
Although drought had reduced the plain to ashes, turning the soil a feathery grey, here was a small oasis of green. Grandpa guarded his vegetable patch as carefully as he would his own life. Uncle and Lingling were dead. Tingting and Little Jun had left. My dad had moved to the city, taking his wife and daughter with him. Grandpa had no family left in Ding Village. But when he thought about his broken family, he didn’t feel particularly sad. He felt cleaner somehow, lighter, as if a burden he’d borne for decades had been lifted from his shoulders.
