Chapter 17

WAIT A MOMENT," GOLD FLOWER SAID TO her husband Plenty Own as they were walking away from the Hsien Public Security Bureau. The strap on one of her cloth shoes had come loose. To button it up she stood on one foot, putting a hand on his arm to steady herself.
Gold Flower had been summoned to the market town to identify a corpse found in the river. It could have drifted there from upstream and the description fitted Gold Root, but they wanted her confirmation.
It had been a hard day for her, Plenty Own told him-self. The long walk along the river to the market town and the farmers they passed staring at the two of them walking between the policemen. Then the view of the body, stretched out on a rough trestle under the light of a single electric lamp in the shed in back of the police station. Aware of the police eyes watching them for some sign of emotion, Plenty Own stared down at the corpse of his brother-in-law, mildly surprised that he had no more feeling than he did. `My brother," he heard his wife say quietly.
It was the first time he had seen a bullet hole; the wound in the flesh of the thigh had been washed clean and the lips of the hole were almost bloodless. The police led them outside for questioning. Finally a comrade in charge was satisfied, asked them to sign some papers they could not read, and let them go. The final question of the disposal of the body—"We'll take care of things unless you have some other plan," the comrade had said mean-ingly. Plenty Own nodded; it would be better if they didn't bring Gold Root back to their own village.
While Gold Flower was leaning on him to button her shoe he brought his face close to hers with a slight turn of his head. He was not looking at her, but she felt self-conscious at this expression of sympathy and her face became more set in its absorbed, inward look that masked her feelings, or rather the absence of them.
Any shock she might have felt at the sight of her brother's body had been well insulated by the numbing sense of strangeness all round. Above all, it was strange to be walking about with her husband in town in the evening. They seldom ever went out together. Just now, in their long trip to town, they had been oppressed by the ominous presence of the two policemen who accom-panied them, but now they were by themselves. Plenty Own took care not to betray the pleasure he felt. He would have been very surprised to learn that it was shared.
They came to the wharf with all the lighted boats bob-bing below in the shimmering darkness. In the dim gold interior of one sampan they could see a bamboo tube nailed on the wall of matting to hold a bunch of red-lacquered chopsticks. On other craft the oil lamps shone through the wash lines. One boat was dark; on the stern a silhouetted figure stood urinating into the river.
Coolies carrying goods and luggages on bamboo poles side-stepped cautiously down the dizzy gray flight of broad, shallow stone steps, a huge, ancient pile of stones dreamlike under the yellow electric light. Rifled militia-men shouted questions across the water. Owners of boats who had a touch of the gangster about them swaggered down the steps with their padded jackets unbuttoned down the front and their leather slippers flip-flapping loudly.
Past the wharf the water front became dark and de-serted. The shops were still closed for the New Year. But farther down there seemed to be something going on and a small crowd had collected around it. Gold Flower and her husband stopped to look. A bystander explained, "It's that boatman who got drunk on New Year's Eve and fell overboard. A strange time to die-on New Year's Eve. So they're holding the ceremony here on the riverbank."
About seven or eight mourners knelt in a row, each holding the one in front of him by the waist. The head mourner who knelt in front was a little boy, probably the son of the drowned man. The traditional white cloth cur-tain wound around the mourners, ending in a knot tied over the boy's forehead. The weeping must have been going on for a long time. The men were hoarse and the women merely moaned weakly, with much murmuring under their breaths. But there was one of them who set up a weird, high-pitched howl that went over their heads, on and off, like a doleful wind. The boy's head dipped forward rhythmically with the fits of weeping, bowing lower and lower. Set before him on the ground was a basket of ashes holding joss sticks.
There were more joss sticks and a tall white pair of lighted candles on a square table that stood a little way off. Two men who were neither monks nor Taoist priests sat side by side at the head of the table. These were pro-fessional reciters of popular Buddhist verses. They were both about thirty, looking like shop assistants in their shabby long gowns. They intoned the verses in unison, their bodies swaying from side to side in the manner of schoolboys reading out loud. The long, rambling half-prayei was in Chinese instead of Sanskrit but Gold Flower could make out only a few lines here nd there. It mentioned the name of the deceased and the place he had come from, the age he had attained, the surname of his wife's family, the number and sex of his children. It spoke of all this with a quiet satisfaction and prayed for his speedy passage into another existence as a human being, preferably a man.
"I'll have the same rites performed for Brother," Gold Flower suddenly said to herself. "Not right now, but later when this talk of fan ké-rnin has blown over." She felt it would free him from the painfully extraordinary circum-stances of his death and make him the same as everybody else. The prayer seemed to have this effect. While the voices droned on by the flickering candlelight on the darkening shore, the dead man was being gently lowered into the sea of humanity.
She promised her brother's spirit then and there that she would arrange for the recitation of prayers and also the adoption of a boy child for his heir, that he might be mourned properly. She would bring up the child and later see to his marriage so that her brother's branch of the family would not die out. She would do her duty toward the T'ans as she had toward the Chous. Her eyes brimmed with tears at the thought of all that she would do for her brother. And she truly grieved for him for the first time since disaster befell him.
The child to be adopted had to be born a T'an. Perhaps Big Aunt might be persuaded to part with one of her grandsons. She had several.
It had been snowing. Big Aunt went out into the fields early in the morning, carrying her warming basket with her, with live charcoal buried in the ashes inside. There was a teen-aged militiaman posted at the village gate which was being watched night and day-the tension was not yet over. The boy whispered to her banteringly, see-ing the basket, "Going to set fire to the storehouse again, Big Aunt?"
"Don't talk nonsense." Big Aunt looked nervously around her. "My grandson is so terribly sick, and you have the heart to joke with me."
It was her youngest grandson. Everybody said he must have "run against something," crossed the path of some spirit and incurred its displeasure. It was hardly surpris-ing, seeing that there had been so many deaths in the village.
Big Aunt knew exactly what it was.
The day after the fire, when the villagers had been set to work clearing up the rubble, a body had been discovered in a cave made between two walls propped up by each other when they had caved in. It was in a sitting position and was a smooth, bright pinkish red all over. The color had stood out glaringly against the charred ruins. It had occurred to Big Aunt—to all of them, in fact, who had been there—that the seated figure suggested one of the bald, slim images of Arhans lined up on both sides of a temple. She had been deeply shocked and awed. She also remembered that monks when they die are always cremated in a big jar, sitting up. It was very odd and would seem to speak of divine origins in Gold Root's wife—for the body was that of a woman and she knew that it was she. This Moon Scent must have been at least a gifted monk in her last life.
She had known it was Moon Scent, but, like every-body else, she had held her tongue. It was one thing to take part in the riot and another thing to burn down the storehouse. Even if it had been generally suspected that it was one of themselves who had done it, it was best to leave matters vague. Who would know in what form retribution would come? The whole village might be demolished as in the Japanese days.
Even the Chairman of the Farmers' Association had pretended that he could not tell who it was. Then Comrade Wong had appeared on the scene and insisted that it was Moon Scent. And the militiaman on duty at the storehouse the night before had turned up and excitedly repeated his story of having chased a prowler back into the burning building.
"I wouldn't be surprised if it was Gold Root T'an's wife," the Chairman of the Farmers' Association had finally admitted. "She's been away for three years work-ing in the city. Who knows what bad company she might have got into, spies and Kuomingtang agents? Here she's been back scarcely a month and this has happened. Must have been sent here on a special mission."
Then Big Aunt had chimed in, "I'm not one to speak ill of the dead, but that one is a real fox and a broom-star.1 I've always known that she couldn't be trusted alone in the city. Must have picked up some gangster, some fan ke-min. Poor Gold Root-she led him around by the nose. See how he had changed after she came back, and he used to be so good and progressive.. Ask Comrade Wong. And the way she beat her little girl! Just like a stepmother! Ask Comrade Ku. He knows. And the things she said to me when we had our quarrel! I never spoke a single word to her after that. Never. Ask anybody."
Afterward, when she had returned home, she had found that her grandson was down with fever. She hadn't said anything to Sister-in-Law Gold Have Got, not wish-ing to alarm her. But in her heart she had quickly ad-dressed herself to Moon Scent, "Now don't be angry, Sister-in-Law Gold Root. 'When alive you were hu-man; after death you are divine.' You won't stoop to plague a child, will you? And when he's your nephew, too."
The child's fever had mounted during the night. This morning Big Aunt had gone out grimly resolved to burn joss money at Moon Scent's grave and risk being caught at it.
"He's your nephew, remember," she kept murmuring to Moon Scent. "I might have offended you but his mother hasn't. You used to be such good friends, remember? Spare the boy, and when he grows up he'll burn joss money at your grave at the New Year and all the important festivals. He'll be like a son to you."
The snow-laden bamboos by the roadside had thick, fat white leaves. The green undersides of the leaves wove in and out of the whiteness when the wind came. The ashes in her basket got blown into her face. She would light the joss money with the live charcoal. Her eyes and nose were running in the stinging cold. The arm was get-ting cramped that held the long string of silver paper cups under her padded jacket. It had to be held high so that it would not show, and slightly away from the body so as not to crush the flimsy silver paper.
The chirp of hungry birds sounded surprisingly loud in the silence of the padded universe. Her eyes scanned the fields for Moon Scent's grave, which she knew would be difficult to locate. The body had been rolled up in a mat and laid in a shallow hole which was merely covered up, with no mound built above it.
She saw a yellow patch way over there beside the forked footpath. "Is that it?" she wondered. "That couldn't be the earth showing through the snow, could it? No snow on her grave!" Her knees went weak with awe.
The sound of dogs snarling floated across the distance, faint but with a distilled clearness. She wiped her eyes and saw that the heaving yellow patch was a pack of wild dogs fighting over the grave. They must have bur-rowed into the ground and pawed it open. She thought she could see a corner of the straw mat showing under the heaped canine bodies.
"It's a sin. It's a sin," Big Aunt muttered as she moved away, flooded with relief. "She certainly can't do anybody any harm," she thought, "if she can't even protect her own bones."
Ku had been sitting facing Comrade Wong every day across the desk. Wong with his graying bandages had many reports to write and Ku busied himself with his script. He had finally managed to work the fire into his story of the dam. No small problem, because how can a dam bum?
The way the story went now, the engineer and old peasants collaborated to solve the problem of the annual floods by building a dam across the stream. However, in this village lived a landlord who had survived the Land Reform through the generosity of the government. He was allowed his acre of land like everybody else and so far he still managed to live better than the others, with much furtive feasting and hasty clearing of dishes when the authorities called. And the potbellied old man still enjoyed the company of a beautiful girl, presumably his concubine. Perhaps it would be better not to stress her marital status since concubinage should not continue to exist under the People's Government. Her main function was to lean decoratively against the table by the light of the flickering lamp and lend atmosphere to the various treasonable dealings of the dispossessed landlord. She would look something like Moon Scent. Ku had refrained from going down to see the body found in the storehouse after the fire, so his memory of her remained unspoiled. In the film it would be summer and the girl would be wearing a striped cotton summer shirt. It would have to be decorously sacklike, but stripes could do wonders.
The landlord was approached by a spy who enlisted his services, conferring on him the rank of a general in the Nationalist Army. Accompanied by his concubine, the landlord skulked out at night to bomb the new dam. A vigilant militiaman detected them in time but they managed to get away without being identified.
When the spy put pressure on him to show some re-sults, the landlord in desperation set fire to the govern-ment storehouse. He was caught red-handed, together with the concubine who scurried in his wake, carrying a small bundle. They were probably thinking of fleeing the country after the deed. The bundle contained, among other valuables, his treasured credentials of a Nationalist general.
Ku was well pleased with the story. It was a neat piece of work. But it would have to be a very small fire. One or two sacks of rice had barely started to smoke when a guard had already rounded the corner shouting, "Fire! Fire! Saboteurs!" Otherwise it would reflect on the effi-ciency of the local militia. Wrathful newspapers would call it "the indiscriminate use of the weapon of satire on the people's own organizations . . . far exceeding the bounds of constructive criticism." The film would not be banned, which would attract too much attention to it, but just quietly withdrawn in the middle of its showing. And any chance of making a name for himself would be gone for good.
The comfort visit to the Soldiers' Families had to be postponed because the firecrackers had been destroyed in the fire and at this late date it was impossible to replace them. After the fifth day of the first moon, when the shops reopened after the New Year, Comrade Wong got up another collection from the farmers and made a special trip to town to buy more firecrackers.
Early next morning the people assembled outside the Village Public Office. The paraders lined up. The Rice-Sprout Song Corps went in front; after them came the gift bearers. They struck up the gongs and cymbals. The dancers started the routine steps, the men and women side by side in two rows, their painted cheeks startlingly red in the cold gray morning light. The gift bearers crouched under their flat-poles and then straightened up with an effort. The pale, bloated halves of slaughtered pigs, cut lengthwise, dangled at the ends of the poles. Pigs' heads sitting in trays had little pink paper flowers tucked rakishly in their ears. Other trays held the white slabs of New Year cakes, hard as bricks, stacked into high mounds.
Comrade Wong saw that the two lines of dancers were straggly from the loss of men in the riot. He motioned to Comrade Small Chang, who went up to the elderly folks standing around looking, and spoke to them. Presently the old men and women, smiling helplessly and pushing each other along, sidled up to the dancers. Big Uncle and Big Aunt were among them. Their old faces puckered in their habitual half-frown, half-smile, they tried to "wriggle the Rice-Sprout Song," throwing their arms creakily back and forth.
Comrade Wong turned to find Ku standing by his side. He jerked his head toward Big Aunt as she danced past. "Sixty-seven this year," he said, smiling, "and so enthusiastic."
"Sixty-eight with the New Year," Big Aunt corrected him jauntily, as if slightly offended.
"Sixty-eight," Wong repeated to Ku with pride.
The dancing stopped soon after they passed into the open fields, to be resumed later when they drew near the neighboring village. But the gift bearers kept up their mincing gait in co-ordination with the bouncing carcasses of pigs hanging from their flat-poles. They proceeded slowly along the winding footpath that led across the tawny brown plain. The gongs and cymbals went on beating loudly,
"CHONG, CHONG! CHI CHONG CHI! CHONG, CHONG! CHI CHONG CHI!"
But under the immense open sky the sound was muffled and strangely faint.