The Four Books (36 page)

On this particular day the weather happened to be good, and the light made it seem as if there were a clear pond in the middle of the compound. Everyone was away, having left behind only piles of warmth and emptiness. Upon noticing that the lock on the Child’s door was gone, I felt an urge to go tell him what had happened while he was away. Needless to say, the Child had gone to see the higher-ups in order to bring back some grain, because he, after all, worked for the higher-ups. If only I could tell the Child what had happened while he was away, he would definitely give me some grain. And if I were to give him several pages describing the Musician’s fornications with the man from the ninety-eighth, the Child would surely give me even more grain or fried soybeans—probably enough for me to survive two or three days without having to drink any seed soup. But just as I was about to enter the Child’s building, an extraordinary scene unfolded before my eyes.

The door opened with a creak, and the Musician walked out, like an actress going onstage for a performance. I don’t know what had happened when she arrived in the compound just ahead of me, but in the fields she had been wearing her usual dark blue shirt with tattered pockets and green patches. In the short period of time since then, she had changed out of that dark blue shirt and into the same tight-fitting pink uniform that she had worn to her rendezvous at the steel-smelting furnace. Her pants were made from twill fabric, and her shoes were black cloth with a velvet buckle. As she walked past I smelled the scent of cold cream, as though an autumn osmanthus blossom were blooming right in front of me. I don’t know what she and the Child had discussed or done in the Child’s room, but when she came out she was carrying a bag wrapped in a handkerchief, which gave off a sweet fragrance of steamed buns that stunned me even from where I was standing, a few paces from the doorway.

The Musician glanced at me, then walked away still holding her bun wrapped in the handkerchief. I quickly peeked into the Child’s room and saw that the Child’s fiery red bed was covered with pile upon pile of large red blossoms, while the Child’s slight frame was swaying next to the bed. His door abruptly slammed shut, cutting off my view like a knife. I looked at the Musician’s thin silhouette as she walked in the distance, and in the sunlight she resembled the reflection of a willow branch in a pool of water.

I didn’t go into the Child’s room. I suspected that the Child was not the same as before, but rather had grown up, with the peach fuzz above his lip already turning black. I suspected that it was precisely when the Musician was in there that he had become a man. It’s hard to say whether I hated the Musician, or simply envied her for being a young vixen who always had a bun or some grain to eat, but as I watched her disappear behind the wall, my heart was weighed down like a cesspool in the summer heat.

I felt an urge to follow her back to her dormitory, and warn her that if she didn’t give me half of the bun that the Child had given her I would inform the Child and everyone else in the district about her encounters with the man from the ninety-eighth. Fortunately, as this thought was flickering across my consciousness, I heard footsteps behind me, and it turned out to be some comrades who had just returned from foraging for food. Their presence prevented me from either following the Musician or proceeding into the Child’s room, but I became more determined than ever to observe the Musician carefully. As long as I observed her, I was sure that sooner or later she would share with me some of the grain she was receiving in exchange for selling her body.

That night, when everyone else buried themselves under their covers, I was outside in the courtyard, in the cold. I predicted that the Musician would visit the Child and, sure enough, around midnight—as the moon was hanging high in the sky, and the bitter wind from the old course of the Yellow River was cutting straight to the bone—she emerged from her building. She first headed toward the women’s bathroom, as though she was going to use the restroom. Seeing that everyone was asleep and the entire compound was as still as an expanse of stagnant water, she stood in front of the women’s bathroom, coughed, then headed to the Child’s building.

I was waiting just outside the main gate to the compound. The Musician would never know that I was hiding and watching her that night. The wind blowing in through the outer wall left my legs and feet numb, and it was so cold it felt like my ears were about to fall off. To keep from freezing to death, I stamped my feet and cupped my ears with my hands. Just as the moon was going from gray to ice blue, I heard footsteps and caught a glimpse of the Musician cutting across to the Child’s room. She tapped lightly on the Child’s window, and when there was no response she knocked harder. I don’t know how many times she knocked, or what the Child said from inside, but I clearly heard her say, “Please, just open the door.” I don’t know what the Child said in response, but the Musician added insistently, “Please open the door, I have something important to tell you.”

After a brief silence, the light in the Child’s room turned on. After the Child opened the door, the Musician immediately slipped inside.

I quickly scurried over, not wanting to miss a single moment of the interaction between the Musician and the Child. But when I reached the Child’s door I hesitated, afraid that he might suddenly emerge and find me standing there, so I retreated for a moment. When there was no sign of the Child opening the door, I approached again. In order to be able to quickly duck back behind the wall if need be, this time I didn’t go directly to the Child’s door, but rather up to his window ledge. I felt emboldened knowing that I could quickly retreat if necessary. I rested my chin on the ledge and pressed my ear up to the vellum window. It was a brick ledge, and consequently a lot of sand ground into my chin. I don’t know what kind of wood the window frame was made from, but it felt hard and smooth. I listened carefully, until I finally heard the Musician utter those words that made me tremble from head to toe:

“Is it that you think I’m too old, or that I’m not pretty enough?” The Musician paused, then said in a clear voice, “I can’t eat your fried soybeans for nothing. In the ninety-ninth, there isn’t anyone who is younger and prettier than I, so you should take me, even if I have to beg you.”

I’m not sure what the Child’s response was. I didn’t hear him say anything, and instead I just heard his footsteps. The Musician continued,

“You want me, and all I ask is that you give me a jar of fried soybeans, which would last me for three to five days. If I can make it though this period, I’ll have another source of food and won’t need to come to you again.” I’m not sure what happened in the room after she said this, but I heard the sound of the bed creaking. That bed was made of either willow or elm wood, and it sounded as though someone were chopping wood. Then it became quiet again. After a while, a strange noise broke the long silence. Through the window, I heard the Child sounding like a teenage boy who’s been humiliated and is pleading with his mother. He said,

“I’m begging you, I really want this.”

“I’m begging you, this is what I’ve always dreamed of.”

I couldn’t quite piece together the fragments I heard, but the sheer passion in the words washed over me like a bucket of warm water. I no longer felt cold, and it seemed as though my hands were even a little sweaty. I stuck out my tongue and, like an eavesdropping peasant, made a date-sized hole in the vellum paper over the window. I placed my eye up to the hole, and what I saw made me feel as though I had stumbled across a snake in the middle of the road. The Child’s lantern was sitting on the corner of the table, and in the yellow light I could see that next to the bed there was still that clay fire pan, in which there were several embers burning amid the ashes. On the floor and wall next to the Child’s bed there were still a few blossoms. Where the other blossoms used to be, there were now all sorts of large red blossoms that the Child had brought back from the higher-ups, while on the straw canopy over the bed there were also several large blossoms, making the Child’s bed look as though it were floating in a red sea. It turned out that the person on the bed like a boat with red sails was not the Child, but rather the Musician. She was stark naked, her shoulders and breasts covered by her flowing black hair. Most of her hair was against her back, but some of it was combed forward over her face and left shoulder. Her face and body were covered in red light, like water that had been dyed red. She was staring at the Child’s unexpected behavior, to which she responded with acute embarrassment. It turned out that the Child, still wearing his pants and jacket, was kneeling down before her. I couldn’t make out the Child’s face, but I could clearly see that on the bed in front of him, amid the flower petals, there was the gun he had brought back after presenting the star-shaped steel ingot to the provincial seat. The pistol was still jet black, and the handle was facing the head of the bed, with the muzzle angled toward the Child’s chest. Kneeling in front of the pistol and the naked Musician, the Child said plaintively,

“I’m begging you, I really want this.” As he was speaking, the Child was facing the Musician’s naked body, but it sounded as though it left no impression on him. He sounded a bit hoarse, like a boy whose voice is just beginning to crack, and it also had a pleading tone. “I’ve been to many places and seen many things, but now this is all I want.” The Child added, “Sit on the pile of blossoms on my bed and shoot me in the chest. This is what I want. I’ve always dreamed of being able to have someone shoot me in the chest while sitting in a pile of blossoms, so that I may fall forward into the blossoms as I die.”

“If you shoot me, both of those sacks of flour and fried soybeans will be yours,” the Child said. “I’ve heard that the Scholar also has a manuscript, and I suspect that he, like the Author, is also writing a book. If you shoot me, I won’t look into the book the Scholar is writing.” As the Child was saying this, he glanced at the red blossoms surrounding the Musician. “In addition, I’ll also give you five large stars. With these stars and this grain, you won’t ever have to go hungry, but rather you’ll be free to return home and decide whom you wish to marry.”

Upon saying this, the Child suddenly became very calm. He stared intently at the Musician’s face, and even pushed the pistol toward her, waiting for her to make a move. But at that moment, the Musician recovered from her earlier embarrassment. She gazed at the Child and bit her lips, then asked him point-blank, “Do you really not want me? Is it possible that you’re not a real man?” As she asked this, she stared intently at his face, though it is unclear what she saw in it. When the Child didn’t respond, she picked up her shirt from where she had tossed it and put it back on, then sat on the edge of the bed and put on her pants. After she had gotten dressed and hopped down from the blossom-covered bed, she stood in front of the Child and said scornfully, “Get up. It had never occurred to me that you might not be a real man. . . . In the future, I won’t come to you for more grain even if I am starving.”

Having said this, she didn’t stop to check to see whether the Child was still kneeling there, and neither did she help him up. Instead, she walked out the door while still buttoning her shirt.

As the door was slamming shut, I once again hid behind the Child’s outer wall.

4.
Old Course
, pp. 457–63

Several days later, there was a winter storm. The temperature dropped to thirty degrees below, and everything froze solid. When people retrieved water from the well in the courtyard, it would freeze inside the bucket if they didn’t immediately transfer the water to a pot and begin heating it. One person was sleeping soundly under his covers, and the next day he was found dead in his bed—and it was unclear whether he had starved or frozen to death. No one had enough strength to walk, much less dig a hole in the frozen ground, and therefore they stopped burying their dead in the field behind the compound and instead would merely leave the corpses piled up on a cot. At first they gave each corpse its own cot, but after a while they began assigning two corpses per cot, and eventually three to five corpses on a single cot, with two adjacent rooms serving as a makeshift mortuary. Whenever someone died, their corpse would freeze solid, and others would lift it like a board and place it on the cot, which would then rattle as the corpses clinked together like ice cubes.

Because it was so cold, everyone stopped going out to look for wild grass and seeds, afraid that they would be blown over by the bone-chilling wind. Coming in from the Yellow River, the wind made a
wu wu wu
sound during the day, like a man sobbing. At night it made a sharp whistling sound, like a woman wailing in front of a tombstone. The Child barricaded himself inside and nailed his windows shut. It had already been three days since he last showed his face. The Scholar came to find me and said, “We can’t let ourselves freeze to death inside our rooms.” I replied, “Let’s burn any extra cots we have.” Around noon on a day that happened to be slightly warmer than usual, the Scholar stood in front of the row of buildings and shouted,

“When everyone goes to sleep at night, every man should hug another man, and every woman should hug another woman. We will then burn the leftover cots for heat.”

The Scholar then asked me, “Do you think that the sand and dirt in everyone’s rooms can be eaten?” I looked at him skeptically, and he laughed, then went back outside shouting again in the direction of that row of buildings:

“Those of you who have leather shoes should eat them, and if you have a leather belt you should eat that, too. But under no circumstances are you to eat any human flesh!”