Yu Hua - To Live

Old Quan didn’t answer us — he just kept looking around. After a while he finally stood up, turned around to look our way and began walking toward us. As he approached he held up four fingers to Chunsheng and me. Shaking his head he said, “I know four of them.”

As soon as he finished, Old Quan’s eyes suddenly opened wide and his legs froze. Then he fell kneeling on the ground. We didn’t know what had happened — but then we saw a string of bullets shooting by. We screamed with everything we had, “Old Quan, hurry!”

It was only after calling a few times and seeing that Old Quan still hadn’t moved that I realized it was over. Old Quan had been hit. I quickly climbed out of the tunnel and ran toward him. When I got to him I saw that his back was soaked in blood. My vision went blank, and I cried out in tears to Chunsheng. After Chunsheng ran over, the two of us carried Old Quan back to the tunnel. On the way back, bullets whizzed by, brushing past us.

We laid Old Quan down, and I used my hand to stop the pool of blood on his back. His back was wet and hot, and the blood, still flowing, oozed out from the cracks between my fingers. Old Quan’s eyes blinked slowly as if he wanted to see us for a moment, and then his lips quivered. His voice sounded hoarse as he asked us, “What’s the name of this place?”

Chunsheng and I raised our heads to look around. How were we supposed to know what this place was? We could only go back to looking at Old Quan. He closed his eyes tightly for a while before slowly opening them. As they opened they got larger and larger, and his mouth was crooked as if he was forcing a smile. We heard his raspy voice say, “I don’t even know the name of the place where I’ll die.”

Not long after finishing that sentence, Old Quan died. As he took his last breath, Old Quan’s head tilted to one side. Chunsheng and I both knew that he was gone; we stared at each other for a long time. Chunsheng cried first, and as soon as he began to weep, I, too, could no longer hold back my tears.

Later we saw the company commander, who had changed into civilian clothes. With paper banknotes tied to his waist and carrying a bag, he was heading west. We knew he wanted to escape with his life. With the banknotes stuffed under his clothes, he walked with a rolling gait, making him look like a fat old woman. A young soldier called out to him, “Commander, isn’t the Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek going to save us?”

The commander turned around and said, “You idiot, at a time like this not even your own mother would save you! Why don’t you save yourself?” Another soldier took a shot at him but missed. As soon as he heard the sound of bullets coming at him, the commander started to run like mad, and his former air of authority completely disappeared. A whole bunch of guys extended their guns to shoot him, and the commander cried out as he jumped back and forth in the snow, running farther away.

The sounds of cannon and gunfire were right under our noses. We could see the shadows of the soldiers shooting on the front, and through the veil of gunpowder smoke we could see the bodies, one after another, sway and fall to the ground. I estimated that I wouldn’t make it past noon — sometime before then it should be my turn to die. After making it through a month amid the gun blasts and bomb explosions, I wasn’t really afraid of death. I just felt that dying in the dark like this was really an injustice. Not even my mother or Jiazhen would know where I had died.

I looked at Chunsheng, and he looked back at me with a long face, his hand still on Old Quan’s body. We had eaten uncooked rice for a few days until Chunsheng’s face became swollen. He stuck out his tongue to lick his lips and said to me, “I want some flatbread.”

It had gotten to the point where life or death wasn’t important anymore. As long as we could taste some flatbread before we died we’d be satisfied. Chunsheng stood up, and I didn’t bother to tell him to watch out for bullets. He looked around for a while and said, “Perhaps there’s some flatbread outside. I’m going to go look.”

As Chunsheng crawled out of the tunnel I didn’t stop him. No matter what, we were both going to be dead before noon anyway, and if he could really get his hands on some flatbread before then, well, good for him. He looked exhausted as he crossed over the field of corpses. After taking a few steps, he turned around to say to me, “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be back as soon as I get my hands on some flatbread.”

With his hands at his sides and his head lowered, he entered the cloud of thick smoke in front of him. The air was dense, filled with the burning scent of gunpowder. The smoke-filled air made my throat itch, and small grains of charred ash got caught in my eyes.

Before noon all those still alive in the tunnels had been taken prisoner. When the Liberation Army, guns in hand, came charging forward, an old soldier told us to put our hands up. His anxious face turned blue as he ordered us not to touch the guns on our waists. He was just as scared as we were. One communist soldier, not much older than Chunsheng, pointed the dark barrel of his pistol at me. My heart stopped and I thought, this time I’m really dead. But he didn’t shoot. He just shouted an order at me. As soon as I heard him command me to crawl out, my heart started beating wildly, and my wish to live returned. I crawled out of the cave and he said to me, “Put your hands down.”

Immediately I relaxed my hands, as well as my anxious heart. All by himself, the soldier marched us twenty-odd prisoners south. Before getting too far we met up with an even larger group of captives. All around us thick smoke twisted and turned as it rose toward the heavens, moving as if it were heading toward the same place in the sky. The ground was bumpy and rough, littered with dead bodies and the blasted remains of firearms and shells. A military truck blackened by flames still made a rustling sound. After we walked for a while, twenty Liberation soldiers came toward us from the north, carrying large white steamed buns. The buns were still hot, and just looking at them made my mouth water. The official escorting us said, “Line yourselves up!”

I had never imagined they would feed us. How wonderful it would have been if only Chunsheng had been there. I gazed off into the distance, not knowing if he was dead or alive. We huddled up close together in more than twenty different lines. Each of us got two steamed buns, and I had never before heard the sound of so many people eating at the same time. It was even louder than the sound of a couple hundred pigs devouring their feed. Everyone ate too fast, and a few even started coughing their guts out, each one seeming to cough louder than the next. The guy beside me coughed louder than anyone — he coughed so hard that he was in tears and had to hold his waist. Even more people got the buns stuck in their throats. They lifted their heads and stared up at the sky without moving.

The next morning we were all summoned over to an empty field. We sat in neat rows on the ground in front of two tables. A guy who looked like a top official spoke to us. First he gave us a barrel of stuff about liberating all of China and then he said, “Whoever is willing to join the Liberation Army, stay where you are; if you want to go home, stand up and go pick up your travel allowances.”

As soon as I heard I could go home, my heart began to race violently. But when I saw the pistol on that official’s waist I began to get scared — it seemed too good to be true. Most people stayed where they were without moving, but a few actually did get up to leave. They walked up to the table and picked up their travel allowances. The official kept staring at them. After they got their travel money they picked up a travel certificate and went on their way. In my heart I was convinced that that official was going to take out his gun and shoot them, just like our company commander had done. But as they walked into the distance the official still didn’t take out his gun. I started to get nervous, realizing that the Liberation Army was really willing to let us go home. After fighting this battle, I knew what this thing called war was. I promised myself never to fight again. I wanted to go home. I stood up and walked over to the official. I dropped to my knees and began to wail like a baby. I had originally planned on telling him that I wanted to go home, but when the words got to my lips they changed. I called out over and over, “Company commander, commander, commander. ”