Yan Lianke - The Four Books

A surge of warmth radiated over to my feet. In that moment of stillness, I opened my eyes and saw the moonlight flowing in through the window like muddy water. After waiting for the light to fade, I crawled over to where the Scholar was lying and whispered, “I have something to tell you.” It was only then that I noticed that the Scholar, who had once been tall and strong, had wasted away to the point that he was now little more than skin and bones. Separated from him only by the sweater and long underwear he was using as pajamas, I felt his bones poking into my body, like a pile of firewood. “Do you know why the Musician’s face still has color? It is because she has a man, who gives her grain to eat.”

The Scholar abruptly sat up in bed, and asked,

“Have you seen this yourself?”

“I followed her several times. They always meet in the second iron furnace of the ninety-eighth, and each time the man always gives her grain and a breadroll.”

The Scholar gazed silently out the window.

“That man was in the military, and is one of the higher-ups from the ninety-eighth.”

The Scholar remained as silent as a piece of black cloth.

“Whenever the Musician hid some food under your covers for you, I would always steal it and eat it.”

The Scholar turned to look at me, and I saw that in the darkness the Scholar’s face looked like a board hanging in midair.

“I can make it up to you.” I too sat up and said confidently, “For each half bun of yours that I ate, I could give you either a full bun or half a jin of fried soybeans — I have a way of getting some grain from that higher-up from the ninety-eighth.”

“No need.” The Scholar slowly lay down, and added in a soft voice, “These days, as long as someone manages to avoid starving to death, it doesn’t really matter what else they do.” As he said this, he tugged on my pajamas, which I hadn’t changed or washed in more than two months, and gestured for me to lie down as well, saying, “Let’s sleep together. If we sleep together, we definitely won’t freeze to death.”

Therefore I lay back down again, and the two of us hugged tightly. I was a year and a half older than he, but embraced him the way I would my own child. He was a head taller than I, but hugged me the way he would his own younger brother. Our stick-thin bodies embraced under the covers, as warmth flowed from one to the other. Because the Theologian and the Jurist in the bed across the way were both cold, they buried their heads under the covers, such that their breath mixed together. After they fell asleep, the sound of their breathing also lulled me and the Scholar to sleep.

The next morning we didn’t wake up until long after the sun had begun to shine in through the window. We were finally roused by the Jurist, who announced,

“While you were sleeping, the Theologian died.”

After a moment of shock, I put on my clothes and shoes and went over to the bed across from mine to try to shake the Theologian awake, but it felt as though I were shaking a stone column. When the Scholar put his finger under the Theologian’s nose, the Jurist said impatiently, “I’ve already tried that. He doesn’t have the faintest trace of breath. He died before dawn. At sunrise I kicked off my sheets, and it was only then that I noticed he had knocked off his covers, at which point he either froze or starved to death.”

The Scholar and I stood in front of the Theologian’s bed. The Theologian’s face had turned an icy shade of green, like a layer of ice over a deep pond. The Scholar turned to me and asked, “What should we do?” I looked at the Theologian and replied, “We should take the body to the morgue room.” I proceeded to wrap the Theologian’s body in a sheet and began carrying it to the morgue. Because the westernmost room in each row of buildings was shielded from sun and exposed to the cold northwestern wind, they were designated as morgue rooms. The Scholar and I were surprised to discover that the Theologian — who was of average height, though he had wasted away to the point that he resembled a pile of sticks — had somehow become as heavy as a stone stele after death. I carried his legs and the Scholar his shoulders, but we had only managed twenty steps before we were so exhausted that we had to stop to rest.

When we reached the morgue, a bitterly cold wind blew right at us, as though we had just stepped into an icebox. Inside, we placed the Theologian’s body on a cot next to the window, beside the seven other corpses. The Scholar counted the corpses on each of the cots, and when he reached thirteen he looked at me. “That’s not too bad,” he said. “It’s not as many as I had expected.” The Jurist brought the Theologian’s teeth-brushing cup, toothbrush, and a couple of pairs of old shoes, together with a little red volume by that highest of higher-ups. He placed all of these items inside the Theologian’s sheet, then came up to us and smiled. He extended his hand, and revealed more than twenty red blossoms. “There are twenty-seven blossoms in total; we can divide them equally among us.”

The Jurist looked at me.

“You can have them all,” I said magnanimously. “I don’t think I’ll be able to survive this famine.”

The Jurist smiled as he placed the small blossoms into his pocket. When he removed his hand, he was holding a sheet of paper folded into an envelope. “I found this under the Theologian’s bed.” As he said this, he opened the envelope, and inside there was a color portrait of Mother Mary. By this point the portrait’s colors had already begun to fade, though the page itself remained intact. Her eyes, though, had been gouged out, leaving her sockets looking like bottomless pits. On the portrait, the Theologian had written, “I hate you!. It is you who made me a criminal!” The Jurist held the portrait and asked, “Do we want to leave this by the Theologian’s side?” The Scholar considered for a moment, then took the portrait and ripped it up, leaving the scraps on either side of the Theologian’s head. He removed the book with the red cover and pried open the Theologian’s rigid fingers, inserting the volume into his grasp.

When I emerged from the morgue room, I heard the Physician screaming from behind the wall in back of the last row of the building. Using all of her energy but without seeming to open her mouth, she shouted, “Hey, can any of you men come help us lift this corpse? For the life of us, we simply can’t budge it!”

The Scholar and I looked at each other, then walked in the direction of the sound, pulled forward as though we were a kite on a string.

5. Old Course , pp. 464–75.

All told, that bitter cold lasted seven days, after which the sun suddenly reappeared in the sky, like an indistinct glow from a fire shining through a layer of ice. The warm weather returned, and people’s footsteps could once again be heard in the courtyard. It was only then that I finally emerged from my room. The leather shoes and belts that had been boiled in the pot had already been consumed, and the Scholar, the Jurist, and I had even drunk most of the black water in which they had been boiled. Fortunately, the sun returned, and everyone could come of out their buildings and resume their search for wild grass. It was early morning, and the sun was only halfway to the top of the sky. I took two more gulps of boiled leather water, then followed the sound of footsteps wafting in.

As soon as I stepped outside, I noticed that there was a half-foot-thick layer of dust on the ground, which felt like stepping on a cotton comforter. While I was standing in the doorway, a bright dot suddenly flew in front of me. I rubbed my eyes, then used my hands to shield them from the light. I saw that the first person to head toward the district gates of the ninety-ninth was the Musician. She was wearing her pink jacket, and when she reached the main entranceway she looked around and saw that there was a bamboo pole as thick as a finger and half as tall as a person impaled in the ground right outside the gate. When the Musician saw the pole she paused and looked around again, then quickly walked over to it. She examined it, tossed it aside, and headed toward her old rendezvous site in the ninety-eighth.