Yan Lianke - The Four Books

“I already ate. There were two pieces of pork.” I looked at him. “You can have another bowl of pork broth, if you wish.”

He hesitated a moment, then said, “I’ll leave the remainder for the Jurist. We are, after all, roommates.”

Upon seeing him get up and place the bowl on the table, I also got up from the bed and uttered that dreaded sentence,

“The Musician is dead.”

He stared in shock, then turned and stood frozen.

“She couldn’t bring herself to eat these, and in the end starved to death. She is in a field behind the compound. I’ve dug her a grave, but haven’t buried her yet. I think you should be the one to put her down.”

As the Scholar listened to me, he looked intently at my face, just as I had looked at him as he was eating the meat. After I finished speaking I examined him, but I couldn’t see any discernible expression of despair or doubt in his face. Instead I saw an expression of relief. “I have long felt that something would happen today,” he said softly, as though that thing he had been anticipating finally came to pass, and as if that thing that had been hanging over him had been disposed of. He inhaled, then sighed and started to walk out of the room. Because he had eaten the soybeans and boiled meat, and had drunk some meat broth, he walked quickly and assertively, as though he were trying to catch the last train out.

I followed him, while carrying the bowl with the other piece of boiled meat, together with some of the Musician’s possessions. The entire way there I had to lean on walls for support. At first I could still see his shadow, but eventually I lost sight of him altogether. As dusk was about to fall, the plain where the river used to run was filled with the scent of dust and the gloomy smell of the setting sun. In this vast and endless silence, I saw someone in the distance slowly making their way forward. Among those graves behind the compound, a single bird flew out of the pit I had dug. When I walked over, I saw that the Scholar had made no effort to begin burying the Musician, and instead was sitting next to the open pit, hugging the Musician’s face to his chest. When he saw me, he said confidently,

“She did not starve to death.”

I told him what I had seen.

The Scholar closed his mouth and turned away from me. He pushed the Musician’s face away from his breast, and after smoothing out her distorted face, he began dressing her with the clothes I had brought. When he finished, he gazed at me fervently, saying,

“I’m begging you on the Musician’s behalf — you mustn’t tell anyone what you know about her, and you certainly must not record it in your Criminal Records . We must help preserve her good name.”

I didn’t say anything, and neither did I nod or shake my head. Instead I just stared intently at the Scholar, specifically at the way he was watching me with distrust. This made it difficult for him to continue, leaving him with little choice but to turn away. He then began carrying the Musician’s corpse into the pit I had dug, and laid that piece of torn blue silk over her body. Then he pulled several white sheets of paper out of his pocket. He squatted down, folded one up, then carefully ripped it into the shape of a star. He did this again for each of the other four sheets of paper, and placed all five white stars on the cosmetics case that the Musician had fashioned from a white cardboard box. Inside she had a comb, a jar of cold cream, a pair of scissors, and a sewing kit, and now there were also five white stars. After placing this box in the Musician’s hand under the sheet, the Scholar clambered out of the grave and began filling it with earth, one spadeful at a time.

The Scholar returned all of the dirt I had dug up and dumped it back into the open pit, creating an oval mound. As the Scholar was burying the Musician, I didn’t go over to help, and instead squatted down not far from where he was working. The setting sun had almost disappeared and the air became even colder. The wind that blew in from the wasteland chilled my legs to the point that I almost couldn’t bear to stand again.

After burying the Musician, the Scholar brushed the dirt from his hands. Just as he seemed about to leave, I went over and offered him the remaining boiled meat. I stood for a moment in front of the Musician’s grave, then removed a dozen or so sheets of paper from my pocket — which were the portions of my Criminal Records that I had found among the Musician’s possessions. Before placing those sheets of paper on the Musician’s grave, I removed a piece of meat from the pot identical to the one that the Scholar had eaten. Then I took the old cleaver and, without saying a word, proceeded to slice the meat into strips, which I then placed on top of those pages from my Criminal Records . Finally, I said to the Scholar,

“Let’s go back.”

The Scholar stared at me, and at those pages from my Criminal Records with the strips of meat on them. He suddenly walked over, squatted down, then pulled up my pants leg. After seeing the frozen blood where I had wrapped my calves with the bedsheet, he slowly pulled my pants leg back down. Then he gradually stood and looked at me. After a long silence, he wailed toward the wasteland and the open sky,

“Scholars. scholars. ”

Tears began pouring down his face, flowing as inexorably as time and hunger.

7. Old Course , pp. 487–93

The Scholar had been right: today there would be wave after wave of new developments.

At dusk, when we left the Musician’s graveside, the Scholar leaned against me as we walked back to the compound. But before we had gone very far, we arrived at the northeastern corner of the wall surrounding the district courtyard, whereupon we noticed that all of our comrades were there cooking something. One plume of smoke after another rose from a number of open-air stoves that were spaced far apart — as though no one wanted anyone else to know what they were cooking.

The Scholar and I both stood behind that courtyard wall watching as the residents of the ninety-ninth squatted next to those open stoves. After a brief hesitation, the Scholar left me and began striding toward the nearest stove. When he reached it, he went up to the fifty-something-year-old professor who was fanning the flames. Before the Scholar had a chance to say anything, the professor looked up at him, glanced over at me, then grabbed the lid of the large tea tin he had been using as a pot, as though afraid we would try to open it ourselves.

The Scholar then proceeded to another stove about twenty paces away, where there was a twenty-something-year-old middle school teacher who tried to use her body to shield from view the earthenware basin that was sitting over the fire. She muttered, “Everyone is doing this. It’s not just me.”

The Scholar went to the next pit, where the Physician was in the process of using stones to construct an outdoor stove. She had taken the porcelain bowl that she usually used to boil wild roots and grasses and placed it on her stones. There was an oval piece of cardboard on top of the bowl, serving as a lid, and in the center there was a hole with a piece of rope through it, which was used to lift the lid. When the Physician saw me and the Scholar, she slowly and deliberately took the piece of kindling she had been in the process of lighting, placed it inside the stone stove, then sat back down. She gazed at us evenly and asked,

“Do you want to see what I’m cooking?”

Neither of us responded, and instead we simply looked at the cardboard on the bowl. Elsewhere, other people had finished cooking and extinguished their fires, and were already starting to eat from the tea tins and porcelain bowls that they were using as pots. The sound of them eating and drinking flowed over to us like water. The Physician looked and calmly remarked,