POW! 3
The north wind was howling that morning, drawing loud complaints from the fire in the stove. The sheet metal lining the bottom of the flue turned bright red and grey metal filings flew off in bursts. The frost covering the walls was transformed into crystalline beads of water not quite ready to slither to the floor. The chilblains on my hands and feet itched and pus oozed from my ears. The melting of humans is a painful process. Mother, who had prepared corn congee in an undersized metal wok, about half full, selected a turnip from the pickling jar outside the kitchen window, broke it in two and handed me the larger piece. That would be our breakfast. I knew she'd saved at least three thousand RMB in the bank, apart from the two thousand she'd lent Shen Gang, a barbecued-meat vendor, at 20 per cent interest a month (a textbook case of usury, with compound interest). How could I be happy eating that kind of breakfast, given the amount of money we had? But I was a ten-year-old boy whose opinion didn't count. Oh, I complained sometimes, but those complaints were invariably met with looks of distress followed by a tongue-lashing over my youthful ignorance. Mother would tell me she was being frugal for my benefit, so that one day I could buy a house and a car, which in turn would make it easier for her to find me a wife.
‘Son,’ she'd say, ‘that heartless father of yours abandoned us, and I have to show him what I'm made of. I want people in the village to see that we get along better without him.’
She also told me that her father, my grandfather, often told her that a person's mouth is only a conduit, and that after fish and meat or grains and vegetables pass through this conduit there's no longer any difference among them. You can indulge a mule or a horse, but you can't indulge yourself. If you want to live well, you must struggle against your mouth. I saw the logic in what she was saying, that if we'd concentrated on eating well over the five years Father had been gone, then we'd have had no tiled roof over our heads, and what good would a bellyful of fatty food do us if we had to live in a thatched hut? Her and Father's philosophies were poles apart. He'd have said: ‘Who wants to live in a mansion if you have to subsist on vegetables and chaff?’ I raised both hands in support of Father's view and stomped both feet in rejection of Mother's. I wished he'd come back and take me away with him, even if he sent me right back after a meal of nice, fatty meat. But all he cared about was eating well and enjoying life with Aunty Wild Mule. He'd forgotten I even existed.
We finished our congee, licking the bowls so clean that they didn't need to be washed. Then Mother took me into the yard, where we piled goods onto the bed of the rickety old walking tractor, a Lan clan castaway whose handles still carried the marks of Lao Lan's big hands. The tires were bald, the diesel engine's cylinder and piston were badly worn and the valve stuck, making the engine sound like an old man with a heart condition and asthma. When it finally turned over, it belched black smoke. It had both an air and a fuel leak and thus produced a bizarre sound somewhere between a cough and a sneeze. Lao Lan had always been a generous man, and that generosity increased drastically after he made his fortune selling water-injected meat. It was he who invented the scientific method of forcing pressurized water into the pulmonary arteries of slaughtered animals. With this method, you could empty a bucketful of water into a two-hundred-jin pig, while with the old method you could barely empty half a bucket of water into the carcass of a dead cow. In the years since, how much of the purchase price for meat the clever townspeople had spent on water from our village will never be known, but I'm sure it would be a shockingly high figure. Lao Lan had a potbelly and rosy cheeks and his voice rang out like a pealing bell. In a word, he was born to be a rich official. That ran in the family. After he became village head, he selflessly taught his water-injection method to the villagers and thus served as the leader of a local riches-through-ruse movement. Some villagers spoke out angrily and some others put up posters accusing him of being a member of the retaliatory landlord class intent on overthrowing the village dictatorship of the proletariat. But talk like that was out of fashion. Lao Lan's response to all of this, announced over the village PA system, was: ‘Dragons beget dragons, phoenixes beget phoenixes and a mouse is born only to dig holes.’
Some time later we came to realize that he was like a kung fu master who would never pass on all his skills to his apprentices, someone who would always hold back enough for a safety net. Lao Lan's meat was water-injected, like everyone else's, but it looked fresher and smelt sweeter. You could leave it out in the sun for two days and it wouldn't spoil, while the others’ would be maggot-infested if it didn't sell by the first day. So Lao Lan never had to worry about cutting prices if his supply didn't sell right away; meat that looked that good was never in danger of going unsold. My father told me it wasn't water that Lao Lan injected into his meat but formaldehyde. Later, after relations between Lao Lan and our family took a turn for the better, Lao Lan told us that it wasn't enough for the meat to be injected with formaldehyde; in order to keep its freshness and colour, it also needed to be smoked with sulphur for three hours.
A woman who's covered her head with a red coat storms into the temple, interrupting my recitation. Her entrance reminds me of the woman who had been sprawled in the breach in the wall not long before. Where has she gone? Perhaps this woman in red is the incarnation of that one in green. She removes the coat and nods apologetically. Her lips are purple, her skin pasty, her face covered with grey lumps, like a plucked chicken. The light in her eyes is like the cold rain outside. She must have been partly frozen, and completely terrified. She doesn't know how to say what she wants, but it's obvious that her mind is clear. Her coat is made of a cheap fabric from which red water drips to the floor—blood, if I ever saw it. A woman, blood, lightning, thunder, the full range of taboos all at one time. She really needs to be driven out of the temple, but the Wise Monk sits in repose, his eyes shut, steadier even than the human-headed Horse Spirit behind him. As for me, I don't have the heart to force a young full-figured woman out into the storm. Besides, with the temple doors thrown open, anyone is free to enter, so by what authority can I drive her out? With her back to us, she holds her hands out through the door and turns her head away from the rain as she wrings out the coat, sending rivulets of red running across the ground to merge with the rain; the colour remains for a brief moment before flowing out of sight. It hasn't rained like this for a very long time. Water cascades off the eaves, a grey waterfall that imitates the roar of galloping horses. Our little temple shudders in the rain, the bats shriek in fear. Then water seeps in through the roof and bounces, with metallic pings, off the Wise Monk's brass washbasin. After wringing as much water out of her coat as she can, the woman turns and nods once again in a show of embarrassment. Her lips twitch briefly, emitting a thin mosquito-like whine. Those swollen lips look like overripe grapes, a more attractive colour than you see in town on that other type of woman standing beneath a street lamp, moving her legs seductively and puffing away on a cigarette. I notice how her white undergarments stick wetly to her skin, highlighting the curves of her body. Her taut breasts are shaped like frozen pears; they must be icy cold. If I could, I'm thinking, and I truly wish I could, I'd remove her wet clothes, have her lie in a tub of hot water to soak up its warmth and bathe from head to toe. Then she'd wrap a large, dry robe round her, sit on a soft, springy sofa, and I'd make her a cup of hot tea—black tea would be best—with milk, and give her some steamed bread. Finally, after the tea and the bread, she'd get into bed and sleep…I hear the Wise Monk heave a sigh, bringing an end to my fantasies, although I can't stop staring at her body. She's looking away now, leaning her left shoulder against the door as she gazes at the falling rain. Her coat, which she holds in her right hand, looks like a newly peeled foxskin. I‘ll continue, Wise Monk. My voice sounds unnatural because my audience has doubled—
My father and Lao Lan once had a savage fight, during which Lao Lan broke one of my father's little fingers and my father bit off a piece of Lao Lan's ear. Intense hostility broke out between our families, until Father ran off with Aunty Wild Mule; after that a friendship developed between Mother and Lao Lan, and he sold us his old walking tractor for what it would have brought as scrap. He even gave her free, hands-on lessons on how to drive it. Naturally, this was grist for the village gossip mill, which spread unsavoury rumours about Lao Lan and Mother, rumours that I, as the son, referred to as a passing wind, for the benefit of my Father, wherever he was. They were envious of my mother's ability to drive a tractor, and the mouth of an envious woman is little more than a stinking bunghole; words that emerge from it are nothing but a smelly passing wind. Money lined the pockets of Lao Lan, our village head and an impressive specimen of a man who grandly drove a truck into the city to sell his meat, someone who had seen every kind of woman there was. How could someone like that be attracted to my mother, whose hair was seldom combed, whose face was dirty more often than clean and who dressed in little better than rags? I remember him teaching my mother to manoeuvre the tractor on the village threshing ground one winter morning soon after a red sun had emerged over the horizon. A patina of frost covered the nearby haystacks as a red rooster perched on the wall, stretched out its neck and crowed loudly, momentarily drowning out the squeals of pigs waiting to be slaughtered. Puffs of milky white smoke rose from village chimneys; a train pulled out of the station and headed off into the sun. Mother was wearing one of Father's old khaki jackets—it was much too big for her—with a red electric cord round her waist as a belt. She sat on the tractor seat and gripped the handlebars. Lao Lan sat behind her on the edge of the cab, legs spread, hands on top of hers—a true hands-on lesson. Seen from front or back, he clearly had his arms round her. Though she was dressed like a train-station porter, devoid of any trace of femininity, she was still a woman, and that was enough for some of the village women's tongues to wag and for some of the village men's pulses to quicken. Lao Lan was rich, powerful and famously lecherous. Just about every remotely attractive female in the village had flirted with him at one time or another, and he didn't care what people said about him. But Mother was a woman whose husband had left her, and talk about widows is always particularly nasty, so she had to be careful not to give the village gossips anything to talk about. Despite that, she let him teach her his way; it was a sort of ‘blinded by greed’ decision. The tractor's diesel engine roared into life as wisps of steam rose from the radiator and the smokestack belched clouds of black smoke, all combining to give the lie to husky exhaustion and potent vigour. The machine carried them recklessly in circles, like a tethered ox being whipped to keep moving. Mother's pale cheeks began to flush and her ears turned as red as a rooster's cockscomb. It was bitterly cold that morning, a dry, windless cold that nearly froze the blood in my veins and nipped painfully, like a cat, at my skin. And yet sweat dotted Mother's face and steam rose from her hair. It was her first time with a machine, her maiden attempt to steer a vehicle of any kind, even one as simple as a walking tractor. She was in obvious high spirits, unbelievably excited. What other explanation could there be for breaking out into a sweat on one of the coldest days of the year? The light in her eyes stunned me by its beauty, the first time I'd seen anything like it since Father had run off. After a dozen revolutions on the threshing floor, Lao Lan jumped off with an agility that belied his obesity. As Mother tensed and looked round to see where he was, the tractor lurched towards a ditch. ‘Turn the handlebars!’ Lao Lan screamed. ‘Turn the handlebars!’ Mother clenched her teeth, tightened the muscles in her cheeks and managed to steer the tractor away only seconds before ploughing into the ditch. Lao Lan had been turning in place, following her progress, never taking his eyes off her, as if a rope were tied round her waist and the other end clenched in his hand, and shouting instructions: ‘Look straight, not at the wheels, they won't fall off. Don't look at your hands. They're too coarse, not worth looking at. That's it, ride it like a bicycle. I told you that you could strap a sow into that seat and it could drive it in circles. But you're no sow, you're a grown woman! Give it some gas, what are you afraid of? All dickhead machines are alike. You don't want to spoil it, just treat it like a pile of junk. The more you baby it, the more trouble it'll cause. That's it, now you've got it, you've stopped being an apprentice. You can drive it home. Mechanization is the future of agriculture. Know who said that? Do you, you little bastard?’ Lao Lan asked, looking at me. I didn't feel like answering—it was too cold and my lips were nearly frozen stiff. ‘Okay, drive it away. Since you're a widow and you have a little boy, you don't have to pay me for three months.’ Mother jumped off the tractor, her legs so rubbery she could hardly stand. But Lao Lan reached out to support her. ‘Be careful,’ he said. Mother blushed and looked like she wanted to say something but all she could manage was a brief stammer. The joy she felt had nearly robbed her of speech. A few weeks earlier we'd told Master Gao, the local clerk, that we wanted to buy Lao Lan's old tractor but hadn't heard back from him. I was only a child, yet even I knew we had no chance. My father had bitten a chunk off the man's ear and ruined his looks—there was no way he was going to sell us anything. If it'd been me, I'd have said: ‘So, Luo Tong's family wants to buy my tractor, do they? Ha! I'll drive it into the bay and let it turn to rust before I'll sell it to them.’ But then, just when we'd lost hope, we heard from Master Gao: ‘The village head is willing to sell it to you at scrap cost. He said you can pick it up tomorrow morning at the threshing ground. He said that he is, after all, the head of the village and that it's his job to see the villagers prosper. He said he'll even teach you to drive it.’ Mother and I were so excited we couldn't sleep that night. She kept saying what a good man Lao Lan was and what a bad man she'd married. And then she rounded it off with a stream of abuse for Aunty Wild Mule. That was when I learnt that Aunty Wild Mule had been the cause of the fight between Lao Lan and Father. I'll never forget that morning. That time it was early summer.
This woman's eyes are really big. There's a tadpole-shaped mole at the corner of her mouth, from which one dark red hair curls out. I'm captivated by the strange look in her eyes, a look of madness. She still has the coat in her hand, holding it up and shaking it out every now and then, making popping sounds. Rain slants in through the door and water continues to drip from her body, forming a muddy pool at her feet. Which, I suddenly realize, are bare. A pair of very large feet, probably a size forty, looking out of place on her body. Leaves have stuck to the tops of her feet, and her water-soaked toes have turned white. As I talk on, I think about her background. In such weather, on a day like this, why would a woman with high arching breasts show up in a little temple in the middle of nowhere? Especially one that enshrines five spirits with superhuman sexual prowess, one that generations of intellectuals have called an ‘obscenity’? Though I have many doubts, my mind begins to fill with warm images. I'm dying to walk up and throw my arms round her, but I don't dare, given the presence of the Wise Monk, especially since I‘ve come with the hope of signing on as a novice and am spewing out my life story for his benefit. The woman seems to understand what I'm feeling, for she keeps looking at me, and her lips, which were clamped shut when she entered, are parted enough for me to see her glinting teeth. They're slightly yellow and not particularly straight, but they seem to be hard and healthy. She has bushy brows that nearly meet above her eyes, which gives her a lively appearance, sort of foreign. I can't tell if the way she tugs at her pants, which tend to stick to her buttocks, is intentional, but every time she lets go they cling to her skin again. I'm sympathetic but have no idea how to help. If I were in charge of this little temple, I'd forget about religious taboos and commandments and ask her into the back room, where she could get out of those wet clothes. Let her put on one of the Wise Monk's cassocks and lay her clothes out at the head of his bed to dry. But would he approve? Without warning, she scrunches up her nose and lets fly a loud sneeze. ‘My lady, you do as you please,’ the Wise Monk says, his eyes still shut. She bows and flashes a smile in my direction, then walks past me, clothes in hand, over behind the Horse Spirit.