POW! 8
Without a sound, the woman slips through the narrow space separating me from the Wise Monk, the wide hem of her jacket lightly brushing the tip of my nose, her chilled calf rubbing against my knee. Flustered, I can't go on with my tale for a moment. She carries the Wise Monk's ancient brass washbasin into the water-soaked courtyard, showing me the profile of her gaunt face, the hint of a smile hidden in her eyes. The mass of clouds above us parts to reveal patches of rosy sky, tinged by gold in the west as the fire clouds of sunset burn their way past. The bats that make their home in the temple wheel in the outside air and sparkle like gold beans. The woman's face lights up gloriously. Her oversized jacket, made of homespun cotton, has a row of brass buttons down the front. She bends over to lay down the laundry-filled basin; it wobbles in the shallow water. She then wades leisurely round the yard, the water covering her calves. The hem of her robe held up in her hands reveals tanned thighs and white buttocks. Imagine my surprise to note that she is wearing nothing underneath! That is to say, if she takes off her robe she'll be standing there naked. The large robe must be the Wise Monk's. I know the details of his personal belongings like the back of my hand but I've never seen that particular robe. Where did she find it? I think back to a moment before, when she passed by me, and recall a musty smell, one that now permeates the air in the courtyard. She strolls aimlessly for a moment before heading to a corner of the wall, urgently, where she makes loud splashing noises; that fish leaps out of the water again behind her, then falls back. She is holding the hem of her robe higher than ever, in order to keep it dry, exposing her buttocks. When she reaches the wall, she grips the hem of her robe even higher with her left hand, bends over and, with her right hand, digs out the twigs and grass that clog up the drain and flings them over the wall. Her buttocks, like brass cymbals, proudly greet the fire clouds in the western sky. Now that the drain is unclogged, she stands up and moves to the side to watch the water flow towards her, carrying twigs and the little plastic horse. The laundry-filled brass basin moves a few feet before settling on the ground. The body of the fish slowly comes into view; for a moment it is able to keep swimming, but it is quickly laid out flat and all it can do is flap about in desperation, splashing water everywhere. I think I hear its shrill screams. The cobblestone path emerges first from the water, followed by the dirt round it. A toad jumps out of the mud, the loose skin under its mouth popping in and out. Frogs set up a din of croaks in the ditch beyond the wall. The woman opens the hand holding the hem of her robe, then smoothes the wrinkles with the other hand, the wet one. The fish flaps up next to her. Though she watches it for a moment and then looks over to where we sit, it is, of course, beyond my ability to decide what she should do about that unfortunate creature. She runs a few steps, muddying her feet and nearly falling in the process but presses that recalcitrant fish to the ground with both hands, then straightens up and looks our way again. She sighs and, in the redness of the sunset, reluctantly picks up the fish and flings it away, its tail snapping back and forth as it sails over the wall and out of sight. But the glittery golden arc it traces in the air imprints itself on my mind, where it will remain for a very long time. She walks over to where the brass basin lies, picks out a shirt and smoothes the collar, then shakes it hard, sending out waves of sound. The red shirt looks like a ball of fire in the sunset. The woman's resemblance to Aunty Wild Mule has led me to sense that there is a special and extraordinarily close relationship between us. Even though I am nearing the age of twenty, when I look at that woman I feel like a boy of seven or eight; and yet, the pounding of my heart and the stirrings of that thing between my legs declare to me that I am that child no longer. She lays the shirt on top of the cast-iron incense burner directly opposite the temple entrance, and spreads the remaining clothes on top of the still-wet wall. With rapt attention I watch how nimbly, how energetically, she jumps up to smooth out each item, over and over. Finished with her work, she walks to the temple entrance, as if it were the door to her home, throws her arms out to stretch her upper torso, then puts her hands on her hips to limber her midsection. Her buttocks shift as if rubbing against an invisible object. I don't know how I'll ever be able to take my eyes off that body, but the possibility of becoming a disciple to the Wise Monk is important enough to make me sacrifice such visual pleasures. For an instant I wonder: if she were to take my hand and lead me to some faraway place, the way Aunty Wild Mule did with my father, would I be able to refuse?
Mother told me to secure the rear hatch of the walking tractor while she went to the wall to drag over a couple of baskets of cow and goat bones. Bending down, she picked up each basket and dumped its bones into the tractor bed. These were discarded bones we'd bought, not the remains of our meals. If we'd eaten the meat off this many bones, even 1 per cent of that many, I'd have had no complaints and no need to miss my father, I'd have stood firmly beside my mother as she denounced him and Aunty Wild Mule for their crimes and their sins. There had been times when I'd felt like cracking open a couple of fresh-looking bovine leg bones just to get at the marrow, but the hawkers always cleaned them out before selling. Once they were loaded, Mother told me to help her dump in some scrap metal. This so-called scrap metal actually included intact machine parts: diesel-engine flywheels, connecting joints for construction scaffolds, even some manhole covers from the city's sewer system; a little of everything. Once we found a Japanese mortar, brought to us on the back of a mule by an old man in his eighties and an old woman in her seventies. Back when we were just starting out, we bought everything as scrap and then sold it back as scrap—at a minuscule profit. We figured things out, though, and began sorting the scrap and selling it to appropriate companies in town. We sold construction materials to builders, manhole covers to sewer industries and machine parts to hardware stores. But since we couldn't find the right buyer for the mortar, we kept it at home as a collectible. I'd made up my mind not to sell it even if we did find a buyer. A typical boy—warlike—I was fascinated by weapons. Since my father had run off with another woman, I'd not been able to raise my head round other children, but now that I owned a mortar I could walk with my back straight, cockier than those who had fathers at home. I once overheard a couple of young village bullies quietly agree to stay clear of Luo Xiaotong because his family had a mortar and he'd use it against anyone who offended him, taking lethal aim at the offender's house. POW! the place would go up in smoke, burn to the ground! You can imagine how proud that made me. I was so happy I could burst. Selling scrap metal to speciality buyers did not bring in as much as the items were worth new but it did sell for more than ordinary scrap and that was how we were able to build a house with a tiled roof in five years.
After we'd loaded the scrap metal, Mother dragged over some cardboard boxes and laid them on the ground. Then she told me to draw water from the pump. This was one of my regular chores, and I knew that the handle was cold enough to peel the skin off my hands. So I put on stiff pigskin safety gloves we'd picked up on our rounds. Almost everything we owned, in fact, from foam pillows to a spatula, had come the same way. Some of our pickings had never even been used—my wool cap, for instance, which was brand-new army ration. It smelt like mothballs and had the date of manufacture—November 1968—stamped in red on the inside. My father was still a bed-wetting little boy back then, my mother a bed-wetting little girl, and me, well, I wasn't. With the gloves on, my hands were next to useless, but it was a bitterly cold day and the base of the pump was frozen solid. A leak at the edge puffed out air each time I pressed down on the handle but no water came out. ‘Hurry up!’ Mother shouted irritably. ‘Stop dawdling. “A poor child grows up fast” but you're ten years old and can't even draw water from a well. Raising you has been a waste of time and effort. All you're good at is eating—eat eat eat. If you devoted half your eating talent to getting your chores done, you'd be a model worker with a red sash.’ Mother grumbled, I seethed. Ever since you left us, Dieh, I've been eating pig and dog food and dressing like a beggar and working like a beast of burden. But nothing makes her happy. Dieh, when you left you were looking forward to a second land reform. Well, I'm looking forward to it more than you ever did. But it won't ever come. It's easier for people to get rich illegally. They're afraid of nothing. After Father left, Mother came to be known as the Queen of Trash. That should have made me the Queen of Trash's son, but in fact I was the Queen of Trash's slave. Her grumbling grew to cursing, and my self-pity shrank to despair. I took off the gloves and grabbed the pump handle with my bare hands. With a sucking sound they immediately stuck to the cold metal. Go ahead, pig iron handle, be cold, be frozen, peel the skin off my hands if you want to. It's hopeless anyway. Smash a broken jar—what difference does it make? I'll freeze to death, so what! She'll wind up with no son, and her big house with a tiled roof and her big truck will be meaningless. She's actually dreaming about my child marriage. Marriage to whom, you ask? To Lao Lan's stupid daughter, that's who. A year older, and a head taller, she doesn't even have a real name—only a nickname, Tiangua, Sweet Melon. A nose infection all year round means she always has two lines of snot above her mouth. Mother would love to improve her social standing by linking up with the Lan clan, and all I think about is setting up my mortar and flattening the Lan house. Dream on, Mother! So what if my hands stick to the pump handle! They belonged to ‘her son’ before they belonged to me. I pushed down, there was a gurgle and water gushed into the bucket. I immediately buried my face in it and began to drink. Stop that, she shouted. She didn't want me drinking cold water. But I ignored her. Best to drink till my belly ached and I was rolling on the ground like a donkey that's stopped turning a millstone. After I carried the bucket over to her, she told me to fetch the ladle. I did. Then she told me to splash water on the paper—not too much and not too little, just enough to give it a coat of ice. That done, she spread another layer of paper over the ice and I splashed on more water. We'd done this so many times it had become routine; there was no need for words. What I spread over the paper was water; what we received in return was money. What the butchers in town injected into the meat was water; what they received in return was also money. After Father ran off, Mother would not allow herself to wallow in self-pity. So, deciding to become a butcher, she apprenticed herself to Sun Zhangsheng. I went along. Mother and Sun's wife were distant cousins. But the ‘white knife in, red knife out’ profession is not suited to women; and even though Mother had an abundance of patience and endurance, she never matched the ferocity of Madame Sun. She and I did all right when it came to slaughtering young pigs and sheep but adult cows were a different matter altogether. They made things almost impossible as we stood there clutching a glinting butcher knife. ‘This is no job for you, Aunty,’ Sun Zhangsheng said to Mother. ‘They're telling people in town to sell undoctored meat, so sooner or later what we're doing will be illegal. We butchers earn our living by injecting the meat with water. The day they put a stop to that is the day our profits dry up.’ He's the one who urged Mother to take up the scavenging business—it required no capital and was a guaranteed livelihood. He was right. In three years, everyone within thirty li knew us as the Queen and Prince of Trash.
We carried the frozen paper over to the tractor, then tied it down with rope. Our destination was the county seat, which we visited every few days and which always left me very sad. So many delicacies were sold there, I could smell them from twenty li away, especially the meat, but also the fish. Yet for me meat and fish might as well not have existed. Mother had our provisions all ready—two cold corncakes and a lump of salted greens. If, by hook or by crook, we got a good price for our scrap, slipped a thing or two past a buyer—local businesses had become increasingly clever over the years, after being cheated by scrap-peddlers from all over—she'd be in a good mood and I'd be rewarded with a pig's tail. We'd sit on our haunches in a sheltered area by the front gate of the local-products business—in the summer we'd sit under a shady tree—and treat ourselves to all the aromas wafting over from a street that slanted off from where we sat while we chewed on corncakes and salted greens. Stewed meat was sold from a dozen open-air cooking pots—the heads of pigs, sheep, cows, mules and dogs; the feet of pigs, sheep, cows, mules and camels; the livers of pigs, sheep, cows, mules and dogs; the hearts of pigs, sheep, cows, mules and dogs; the stomachs of pigs, sheep, cows, mules and dogs; the entrails of pigs, sheep, cows, mules and dogs; the lungs of pigs, sheep, cows, mules and dogs; and the tails of pigs, sheep, cows, mules and camels. There was also roasted chicken, roasted goose, braised duck, steamed rabbit, barbecued pigeon and fried sparrow…the cutting boards groaned under every possible kind of steaming, and colourful meat. The sellers held gleaming knives; some cut the fine meat into strips, some into chunks. Their red, oily faces looked hale and hearty. Some had thick fingers, some thin; some had long fingers, some short. They were all lucky fingers, free to caress the meat at will, covered in grease and overlain with redolence. How happy I'd have been to turn into one of those fingers. But it was not to be. More than once I was tempted to snatch a piece of meat and stuff it into my mouth, but the knives in their hands were powerful deterrents. So I chewed on my half-frozen corncake as the cold winds swirled round me, and wept tears of sadness. My mood improved if Mother rewarded me with a pig's tail, but how much meat did one of those have? A few mouthfuls at best. I even crunched up the little bones and swallowed them. But the pig's tails merely made the meat-starved worms in my stomach hungrier, and as I stared at the multi-hued meats in front of me my tears flowed unchecked. ‘Why are you crying, son?’ Mother asked. ‘I miss Dieh.’ Her face darkened. But after pondering my answer, she smiled sadly and said: ‘It's not him you miss, son, it's the taste of meat. Don't think you can put something over on me. I can't satisfy that craving of yours, at least not now. The mouth is first to fall prey to pampering, which is inevitably accompanied by trouble. Throughout history, many heroic individuals have lost sight of their ambition and come to grief by surrendering to their mouths. So don't cry, son. I promise you, the day will come when you'll eat your fill of meat. Once we've got a nice house and a truck, once we've got you married, to show that bastard of a father what I can do, I'll cook you a whole cow, then let you climb inside it and eat your way out!’ ‘Niang,’ I said, ‘I don't want a nice house or a truck, and I don't want to get married. All I want is a big plate of meat.’ ‘Son,’ she said solemnly, ‘do you think I have no cravings? I'm human too, I'd love to eat a whole pig too! But life demands that you keep your dignity, and I want your father to see that we're better off without him.’ ‘Better off?’ I said. ‘Like hell we are! I'd rather be a starving beggar with Dieh than live like this with you.’ ‘That hurts, boy,’ she said. ‘I skimp and I save, storing up my anger to pay him back. And for what? For you, you little bastard!’ Then she turned her anger on my father: ‘Luo Tong, I say, Luo Tong, you son of a black-dick donkey, you've ruined my life…If I feasted on fine, spicy food, if I ate and drank what I wanted, my eyes would shine and I'd be as enticing as that whore!’ Mother's mournful outburst moved me to the depths of my soul. ‘You're right, Mother,’ I said. ‘If you ate big meaty meals, I guarantee that within a month you'd turn into a goddess, more beautiful than Aunty Wild Mule. Then Dieh would abandon her and fly back to you.’ ‘Tell me the truth, Xiaotong,’ she asked, her tears flowing, ‘am I really more beautiful than her?’ ‘Sure you are, Niang,’ I said confidently. ‘Then why did he go after a slut who'd been screwed by every man in town? Not just go after her but run off with her?’ I rushed to Father's defence: ‘I heard him say he didn't go looking for Aunty Wild Mule, that she went looking for him.’ ‘What's the difference?’ Mother growled. ‘If the bitch doesn't wiggle her arse, the mutt's wasting his time. If the mutt isn't interested, the bitch wiggles her arse for nothing.’ ‘Mother,’ I said, ‘you wiggle so much you've got me all confused.’ ‘You little snot,’ she snapped, ‘don't pretend you're confused. You knew what was going on between your father and Wild Mule but you helped him keep it a secret. If you'd told me, I'd have stopped him from running off.’ ‘How?’ I asked timidly. ‘I'd have chopped off his legs’, she snapped, glaring at me. Wow! Lucky Dieh, I thought. ‘You haven't answered my question,’ she said. ‘If I'm more beautiful than Wild Mule, why did he run off for her?’ ‘Because her family eats meat at every meal,’ I said. ‘It was the smell of meat that drew him to her.’ ‘Then if I cook meat every day from now on,’ Mother sneered, ‘will your father's sense of smell bring him home?’ ‘You bet it will!’ I said gleefully. ‘If you cook meat every day, he'll be home in no time. He can smell something eight hundred li away upwind and three thousand downwind.’ I used fine-sounding words to encourage Mother, hoping that her anger would wilt in the face of my reason and that she'd lead me over to the meat street, take out some of the money she'd hidden in her clothes and then buy a pile of fragrant, tender meat for me to eat my fill. Even if I ate myself into the grave, I'd at least be a ghost with a full belly. She wasn't convinced. Brimming over with resentment, she walked up to the wall, hunkered down and ate her cold corncake. But my words had not been entirely in vain. Soon, with great reluctance, she went over to a little cafe near the meat street and chatted with the owners for the longest time, trotting out a litany of lies: my father was dead and wouldn't they take pity on his widow and orphaned child…They finally knocked ten fen off the price of a skinny-as-a-string-bean pig's tail; she held it tight it in her hand, as if afraid of it sprouting wings and flying away. Then she dragged me to an out-of-the-way spot and shoved it into my hands: ‘Here, you greedy little thing. Eat! But when you're finished I expect you to work hard.’