Life and Death are Wearing Me Out (68 page)

When I made it back through the dirty water, I saw your wife with her head under your left armpit, your left arm draped loosely over her chest like an old gourd. Her right arm was around your waist, and your head was leaning against hers. She struggled to move you forward. You were wobbly, but you could still move, which not only told her you were alive but that your mind was relatively clear.

After helping her close the gate I walked around the yard to get my emotions under control. Your son came running outside dressed only in his underwear. “Papa!” he shouted, starting to sob. He ran up to your other side to help your mother support you, and the three of you walked the remaining thirty or so paces from the yard to your wife’s bed. The tortuous trek seemed to take an eternity.

I forgot that I was a mud-streaked dog and felt that my fate was tied up with yours. I followed behind you, whining sadly, all the way up to your wife’s bed. You were covered with mud and blood and your clothes were ripped; you looked like a man who’d been whipped. The smell of urine in your pants was strong; obviously you’d peed your pants when they were beating you. Even though your wife valued cleanliness above almost everything, she didn’t hesitate to lay you down on her bed, a sign of affection.

Not only didn’t she care how dirty you were when she laid you down on the bed, she even let me, dirty as I was, stay in the room with you. Your son knelt by the bed, crying.

“What happened, Papa? Who did this to you?”

You opened your eyes, reached out, and rubbed his head. There were tears in your eyes.

Your wife brought in a basin of hot water and laid it on the bedside table. My nose told me she’d added some salt. After tossing a towel into the water, she began taking off your clothes. You fought to sit up. “No,” you sputtered, but she pushed your arms back, knelt beside the bed, and unbuttoned your shirt. It was obvious you didn’t want your wife’s help, but you were too weak to resist. Your son helped her take off your shirt, and so you lay there, naked from the waist up, on your wife’s bed as she wiped your body down with the salty water, some of her tears, also salty, dripping onto your chest. Your son’s eyes were wet, and so were yours, tears slipping out and down the sides of your face.

Your wife didn’t ask a single question during all this time, and you didn’t say a word to her. But every few minutes, your son asked you:

“Who did this to you, Papa? I’ll go avenge you!” You did not answer, and your wife said nothing, as if by secret agreement. Seeing no alternative, your son turned to me.

“Who beat my father, Little Four? Take me to find them so I can avenge him!”

I barked softly, apologetically, since the typhoon winds had scattered the smells.

With the help of your son, your wife managed to get you into dry clothes, a pair of white silk pajamas, very loose and very comfortable; but the contrast made your face appear darker, the birthmark bluer. After tossing your dirty clothes into the basin and mopping the floor dry, she said to your son:

“Go to bed, Kaifang, it’ll soon be light outside. You have school tomorrow.”

She picked up the basin, took your son’s hand, and left the room. I followed.

After washing the dirty clothes, she went over to the east-side room, where she turned on the light and sat on the stool, her back to the chopping board; with her hands on her knees, she rested her head on her hands and stared straight ahead, apparently absorbed in her thoughts.

She was in the light, I was in the dark, so I saw her face clearly, her purple lips and glassy eyes. What was she thinking? No way I could know. But she sat there until dawn broke.

It was time to cook breakfast. It looked to me like she was making noodles. Yes, that’s what she was doing. The smell of flour overwhelmed all the putrid smells around me. I heard snores coming from the bedroom. Well, you’d finally managed to get some sleep. Your son woke up, his eyes heavy with sleep, and ran to the toilet; as I listened to the sound of him relieving himself, the smell of Pang Ghunmiao penetrated all the sticky, murky odors in the air and rapidly drew near, straight to our gate, without a moment’s hesitation. I barked once and then lowered my head, overcome by weighty emotions, a mixture of sadness and dejection, as if a giant hand were clamped around my throat.

Ghunmiao rapped at the gate, a loud, determined, almost angry sound. Your wife ran out to open the gate, and the two women stood there staring at each other. You’d have thought there was no end to what they wanted to say, but not a word was uttered. Chunmiao stepped — dashed is more like it — into the yard. Your wife limped behind her and reached out as if to grab her from behind. Your son dashed out onto the walkway and ran around in circles, his face taut, looking like a boy who simply didn’t know what to do. In the end, he ran over and shut the gate.

By looking through the window I was able to watch Chunmiao rush down the hallway and into your wife’s bedroom. Loud wails emerged almost at once. Your wife was next into the room, where her wails supplanted Chunmiao’s with their intensity. Your son was crouching alongside the well, crying and splashing water on his face.

Once the women’s crying stopped, difficult negotiations began. I couldn’t make out everything that was said, owing to the sobs and sniveling, but picked up most of it.

“How could you be so cruel as to beat him that badly?” Chunmiao said that.

“Chunmiao, there’s no reason for you and me to be enemies. With all the eligible bachelors out there, why are you dead set on destroying this family?”

“I know how unfair this is to you, and I wish I could leave him, but I can’t. Like it or not, this is my fate. . . .”

“You choose, Jiefang,” your wife said.

After a moment of silence, I heard you say:

“I’m sorry, Hezuo, but I want to be with her.”

I saw Chunmiao help you to your feet and watched as you two walked down the hall, out the door, and into the yard, where your son was holding a basin of water. He emptied it on the ground at your feet, fell to his knees, and said tearfully:

“Don’t leave my mother, Papa . . . Aunty Chunmiao, you can stay . . . your grandmothers were both married to my grandfather, weren’t they?”

“That was the old society, son,” you said sorrowfully. “Take good care of your mother, Kaifang. She’s done nothing wrong, it’s my doing, and though I’m leaving, I’ll do everything in my power to see you’re both taken care of.”

“Lan Jiefang, you can leave if you want,” your wife said from the doorway. “But don’t you forget that the only way you’ll get a divorce is over my dead body.” There was a sneer on her face, but tears in her eyes. She fell as she tried to walk down the steps, but she scrambled to her feet, made a wide sweep around you two, and pulled your son to his feet. “Get up!” she growled. “No boy gets down on his knees, not even if there’s gold at his feet!” Then she and the boy stood on the rain-washed concrete beside the walkway to make way for you to leave.

In much the same way that your wife had helped you walk from the gateway to her bedroom, Chunmiao tucked her left arm under yours, which hung loosely in front of her chest, and put her right arm around your waist, so the two of you could hobble out the gate. Given her slight figure, she seemed in constant danger of being knocked off balance by the sheer weight of your body. But she held herself straight and exerted strength that even I, a dog, found remarkable.

A strange, inexplicable emotion led me up to the gate after you’d left. I stood on the steps and watched you go. You stepped in one mud puddle after another on Tianhua Avenue, and your white silk pajamas were mud-spattered in no time; so were Chunmiao’s clothes, a red skirt that was especially eye-catching in the haze. A light rain fell at a slant; some of the people out on the street were wearing raincoats, others were holding umbrellas, and all of them cast curious glances as you passed.

Filled with emotion, I went back into the yard and straight to my kennel, where I sprawled on the ground and looked over at the east-side room. Your son was sitting on a stool, weeping; your wife placed a bowl of steaming hot noodles on the table in front of him.

“Eat!” she said.

Finally, Chunmiao and I were together. A healthy man could make the walk from my house to the New China Bookstore in fifteen minutes. It took us nearly two hours. In the words of Mo Yan: It was a romantic stroll and it was a tortuous trek; it was a shameful passage and it was a noble action; it was a retreat and an attack; it was surrender and resistance; it was weakness and strength; it was a challenge and a compromise. He wrote more contradictory stuff like that, some of it on target, some just trying to be mystifying. What I think is, leaving home, supported by Chunmiao, was neither noble nor glorious; it just showed we had courage and honesty.

When I think back on that day, I see all those colorful umbrellas and raincoats, all the mud puddles on the street, and the dying fish and croaking frogs in some of the standing water. That torrential rainfall of the early 1990s exposed much of the corruption masked by the false prosperity of the age.

Chunmiao’s dormitory room behind the New China Bookstore served as our temporary love nest. I’d fallen so low I no longer had anything to hide, I said to Big-head, who could see almost everything. Our relationship was not built solely on sex, but that’s the first thing we did after moving into her dormitory, even though I was weak and badly hurt. We swallowed one another’s tears, our bodies trembled, and our souls intertwined. I didn’t ask how she’d gotten through the days, and she didn’t ask who had beaten me. We just held each other, kissed, and stroked each other’s body. We put everything else out of our minds.

Forced by your wife, your son ate half a bowl of noodles, mixed with his tears. She, on the other hand, had a huge appetite. She finished her bowl, along with three large garlic cloves, then peeled a couple more cloves and finished off your son’s noodles. The peppery garlic turned her face red and dotted her forehead and nose with beads of sweat. She wiped her son’s face with a towel.

“Sit up straight, son,” she said firmly. “Eat well, study well, and grow up to be a man I can be proud of. They’d like nothing better than to see us die. They want us to make fools of ourselves, well, they can dream on!”

It was time for me to take your son to school, so your wife saw us to the door, where he turned and wrapped his arms around his mother. She patted him on the back and said:

“Look, you’re almost as tall as me, big boy.”

“Mama, don’t you dare—”

“That’s a laugh,” she said with a smile. “Do you really think I’d hang myself or jump down a well or take poison over scum like them? You go on, and don’t worry. I’ll be going to work in a little while. The people need their oil fritters, which means the people need your mama.”

We took the short route, as always, and when some bright red dragonflies swooped by, your son jumped up and neatly caught one in his hand. Then he jumped even higher and caught another one. He held his hand out.

“Hungry, Dog? Want these?”

I shook my head.

So he pinched off their tails, plucked a straw, and strung them together. Then he flung them high in the air. “Fly,” he said, but they just tumbled in the air and landed in a mud puddle.

The storm had knocked down the Fenghuang Elementary School buildings, and children were already jumping and climbing on broken bricks and shattered tiles. They weren’t unhappy; they were delighted. A dozen mud-spattered luxury sedans were parked at the school entrance. Pang Kangmei, in knee-length pink rain boots, had rolled her pant legs up to her knees. Her white calves were spattered with mud. Wearing blue denim work clothes and dark sunglasses, she was speaking through a battery-powered bullhorn.

“Teachers, students,” she said hoarsely, “the category nine typhoon has brought terrible destruction to the county and to our school. I know how bad you all must feel, but I bring sympathy and good wishes from the County Committee and the county government. Over the next three days there will be no classes while we clean up the mess and restore the classrooms. In sum, even if I, Pang Kangmei, Party secretary of the County Committee, have to work while sitting in a mud puddle, you children will have bright, airy, safe classrooms to learn in.”

Pang Kangmei’s comments were met with enthusiastic applause; some of the teachers had tears in their eyes. Pang Kangmei continued:

“At this critical moment, in the midst of our emergency, all county cadres will be here, demonstrating their loyalty and enthusiasm, performing great service. If any of them dare shirk their duty or slack off, they will be severely punished.”

In the midst of this emergency, even though I was the deputy county chief in charge of education and hygiene, I was hiding in our little room, my body entwined with my lover’s. Without question, this was unimaginably shameful behavior. Even though I was badly beaten and had no idea what had happened to the school and was a man in love, I could put none of these on the table as an acceptable reason. So, a few days later, when I sent in my letters of resignation and withdrawal from the Party to the County Committee’s Organization Department, Deputy Director Lü said with a sneer: