Yan Lianke - The Four Books

The Child went to the headquarters to report the good news and claim his reward.

The Child stayed overnight at the headquarters, and by the time he returned to the ninety-ninth, the Technician had been gone for two days. When the Child returned, he not only brought a cart filled with rice and flour, together with two bowl-sized red silk blossoms; he also brought the Technician an even larger red silk blossom. The Child planned to host a commendation meeting, as he had seen others do, in which he would pin the blossom to the Technician’s chest and then publicly declare that he was now a new man. By the time the Child returned, however, the Technician had already left.

Back in the ninety-ninth, everyone, without needing to be asked, had swept the courtyard, wiped down the doors and windows, and in the doorway someone posted two enormous red couplets that had an even more sublime inscription: “Overturning heaven and earth, using their ocean-like granaries to laugh at the Western nations; shooting the moon and the sun, as the steel piles up so high that it nearly reaches the sky.”

When the Child returned, he stood in the doorway, gazing at those couplets. After appearing to understand their meaning, he looked at the thick wooden door, which had repeatedly been washed, together with the sandy ground in front of the door, which had been swept clean and then sprinkled with water to keep down the dust that splattered across the floor like images in an atlas. While the terrain had been very uneven, it was now as smooth as a mirror and covered in bright sand and sparkling water. The bright sun hung warmly in the sky like a firelight. The Child returned, and everyone went to the entranceway to meet him, dividing into two groups as though they were meeting one of the highest of the higher-ups. When the Child’s cart came to a stop, they began applauding.

The Child stood up in the cart, the excitement on his face mixing with the brightness of the sun.

“Where is the Technician?” the Child asked the crowd.

“He’s gone,” someone replied. “Yesterday he collected his five stars and left.”

A look of surprise and displeasure appeared on the Child’s face.

Observing the changed condition of the entranceway and the courtyard, the Child’s look of surprise faded. “Now that he has left, he can no longer accept this blossom,” he observed regretfully. He waved the silk blossom back and forth, a smile shimmering on his face like a butterfly. He grinned and looked at the cart driver and the bay horse that was pulling the cart full of rice and flour. The Child then returned to his building to retrieve that small wooden box, reemerged, and stood behind the horse, shouting,

“Who was it that swept this area around the entranceway?”

A middle-aged professor came forward, and the Child awarded him three small blossoms.

“Who wrote this couplet and posted it in the entranceway?”

The sixty-eight-year-old Linguist stood up, his smile as innocent and unaffected as a child’s. When he reached the Child, the Linguist bowed his head, then turned around and looked back at his comrades. Unexpectedly, he discovered that everyone was watching him and smiling, and there was a warm sound of encouragement and applause. The Child didn’t give the Linguist two or three small blossoms, but rather directly gave him two palm-shaped medium-sized ones, or the equivalent of ten small blossoms. As the Linguist was accepting these blossoms, his hands trembled. He bit his lips and wanted to say something, but couldn’t get the words out. Behind him, the applause seemed to go on forever.

From that point on, the ninety-ninth began to boil over.

The Child’s and the Technician’s discovery of how to smelt steel from black sand would resolve the steel-smelting problems not only of the ninety-ninth, but also of the entire Yellow River Re-Ed region, the entire province, and even of the entire country, so that the whole world might observe this ingenious Oriental wisdom. In order to make this model as brilliant as possible, it was first necessary to get the higher-ups to send down a cartful of magnets. These could be round, bar, or horseshoe magnets, but once the ninety-ninth had the magnets in hand, they could relocate their steel-smelting furnaces, their canteens, and their bedding to this wasteland eighty li away. They would dig row after row of steel-smelting furnaces along the riverbank, using black sand and wood from nearby willow, poplar, elm, and vitex trees to commence the steel-smelting saga that would shock not only the nation but even the entire world.

While the residents of the ninety-ninth were waiting for the magnets to arrive, they all wrote the Child proposals and letters of commitment. Every day, they would hide their hatchets, brooms, saws, and cooking utensils in their chests and bedding, so that after they finished their sweeping they could earn a small red blossom for handing them over. They used tile basins to fetch water from the river, and after they sprinkled the water on the newly swept ground they could also earn a red blossom. The Theologian went to the restroom, and because he couldn’t find a shovel with which to dig out that overflowing latrine, he proceeded to roll up his pants and jump right in, using his bare hands to transfer the shit into jugs and haul it to the fields. After the latrine was cleaned up, he went to the river to wash his hands and feet, whereupon he would then extend his hand — now red from the cold — to the Child to accept a medium-sized blossom or two.

In just a few days, some people managed to increase their collection of red blossoms from only one or two to several dozen. There were even some people who, because they had run out of room above their beds or desks, had to exchange their small blossoms for medium-sized ones, or even for pentagonal stars.

Just as everyone’s collection of blossoms and stars was growing by leaps and bounds, a mule cart arrived with a sack full of magnets, as well as the Scholar and the Musician. The cart arrived in the evening, with the distant clopping sound of horse hoofs piercing the cold winter sky. Those in Re-Ed who were cleaning the courtyard shouted down the road,

“Are you coming to bring us magnets?”

The cart driver repeatedly shouted Ai, Ai! He brought down his whip with a snap, and the mule began galloping noisily toward the ninety-ninth. Everyone ran to the main entrance of the compound, and they noticed that the Scholar and the Musician were sitting in the back of the cart. The two of them were sitting across from one another, and they were each wearing a white dunce cap with the word criminal written on it. They were also wearing a cardboard placard over their chest, on which the word adulterer appeared in large, black characters. Next to the word adulterer , there was a picture of a man and a woman lying down in an embrace. If you looked closely, you would see that the man in the picture resembled the Scholar, while the woman resembled the Musician. With just a few strokes, the picture had successfully captured their likeness and spirit. The word adulterer , meanwhile, was written in a Yan Zhenqing — style wild grass script, like a tree full of leaves and branches being blown by the wind. There were many calligraphers in Re-Ed, and they all wrote their political slogans and drew their propagandistic images in an expert manner, like someone skilled in driving a cart or farming the land.

With the Scholar and Musician wearing their dunce caps and placards, which years later would become priceless collectibles, the cart stopped in the entranceway to the district. The Scholar and Musician raised their heads and looked at everyone crowded around. The Musician was holding a bottle of iodine, and her face was stained purple. Sweat was beginning to soak through that purplish layer, and strands of hair were sticking to her cheeks, making her appear as though she had just escaped from a mental asylum. Her red jacket, which she used to keep perfectly clean, was now covered in dust and mud, and cotton stuffing was falling out of the holes in the shoulder and the front. The Scholar’s clothes, meanwhile, were not torn, though his face was covered in cuts and bruises from where he had been beaten. His lips were tightly shut, as though his face were marked by a dark crease. He had two large lumps on his forehead, and given that it was bitter cold those bumps were therefore hard as ice. In addition, his left wrist was fractured and bound with rope, and he kept it hidden behind the adulterer sign.