Mo Yan - The Garlic Ballads

Too weak to stand, she gave in to the gentle pressure of his hands and sat down. So did Father and Mother, he to recommence smoking his pipe, she to ponder a way to bring Jinju around. Meanwhile, Elder Brother went into the house to mix some noodle paste for her injured head. But she pushed him away when he tried to daub it on her.

“Be a good girl,” he said, “and let me put some of this on.”

“Why are you treating her like that?” Father asked. “She has no sense of shame!”

“Look who’s talking,” Jinju snapped back.

“Watch that mouth of yours,” Mother threatened.

Elder Brother fetched his stool and sat with the others.

A meteor whistled as it sliced through the Milky Way.

“Jinju, remember when you were two, how I took you and your brother fishing in the river? I sat you down on the bank when we got there so he and I could put out the nets, and when I turned around, you were gone. I almost died. But Second Brother yelled, There she is!’ And when I looked, you were thrashing in the river. So I cast my net and caught you first try. Remember what Second Brother said? This time you caught a great big fish!’ My leg was fine then. The bone didn’t go soft till the next year. …” He stopped and sighed, then continued with a self-deprecating laugh: “Nearly twenty years ago that was, and now you’re a grown woman.”

More sighs.

Jinju listened to the crisp hoofbeats of the chestnut colt as it ran past the gate and down the edge of the threshing floor, and to the squawking of parakeets in Gao Zhileng’s yard. She neither wept nor laughed.

Father stood up after knocking his pipe against the sole of his shoe and coughed up some phlegm. “It’s bedtime,” he said as he walked inside, then emerged with a large brass lock for the gate. Snap . He locked it.

2.

The Fang compound was humming the following evening. The two sons had carried an octagonal table outside and borrowed four benches from the elementary school. Mother was inside cooking, her wok sizzling. Jinju stayed indoors — hers was the small room off her brothers’ bedroom — listening to the racket outside. She hadn’t left her room all day, and Elder Brother, who stayed home instead of tending the fields, came in to make small talk every few minutes, it seemed. But she threw the covers over her head and didn’t reward him with a single word in reply.

Father and Mother were speaking in hushed tones in the outer room. “They’re all wilted and yellow,” she said, “and wrapping them in plastic doesn’t help.”

Jinju smelled garlic.

“You didn’t seal them tightly enough,” Father said. “They won’t get dry or turn yellow if you keep the air out.”

“I don’t know how the government manages to keep them so nice and green all the way to winter, like they were fresh out of the ground,” Mother said.

“Cold storage, that’s how. Even in midsummer you have to wear a coat and lined pants in one of those places. How could they fail?”

“Leave it to the government to get things done,” Mother said with an admiring sigh.

“As long as they can squeeze us common folk.”

The wok sizzled some more, suffusing the house with the smell of garlic.

“Why not have Second Brother go talk to Deputy Yang at the township office?”

“No,” Father disagreed. “He might get tired of being asked, and not come at all.”

“He’ll come. If not for us, at least for his nephew’s sake.”

“It’s not his real nephew,” Father said heavily.

Later on, when the lamps were lit, Jinju heard voices in the yard, and from the audible snatches of conversation she could tell that the guests included her future father-in-law, Liu Jiaqing, and Cao Jinzhu, the father of her future sister-in-law, Cao Weiding. Other future family members were present, as was Deputy Yang from the township government. Once the formalities were dispensed with, it was time to start drinking.

Elder Brother walked into Jinju’s bedroom with a steamed bun and a plate of garlic-fried pork. “Sister,” he said softly, “eat something. Then wash up, change your clothes, and come greet your future in-laws. Your grandfather-in-law is asking about you.”

Not a word, not a sound.

“Don’t be foolish,” he continued in a low voice. “Someone as rich as Mr. Liu surely didn’t come empty-handed today.” Not a word, not a sound.

He placed the food on the kang and left dispiritedly. Out in the yard the drinking games had begun, and the party was starting to warm up. Deputy Yang could be heard above the others. Then Jinju heard Mother and Elder Brother whispering in the next room.

“How much is left?” he asked.

“A good half-bottle — seven ounces or more. Is that enough?”

“Far from it. Deputy Yang and old man Liu can polish off a whole bottle by themselves.”

“How about borrowing some?”

“At this time of night? Go get an empty bottle. We’ll dilute what we have with water and try to make do.”

“What if they taste the difference? We’d be laughingstocks.”

“Their taste buds are numb by now. They can’t taste a damned thing.”

“Still, it doesn’t seem right.”

“Doesn’t seem right? Everywhere you turn these days someone is trying to cheat us out of something. Anyone who doesn’t cheat back is a fool. If even the government co-op is dishonest, what’s to stop us poor peasants?”

Mother said nothing, and a moment or so later Jinju heard the sound of liquid being poured into a bottle. “Do we have any DDT?”

“You horrid beast!” Mother tried to keep her voice down. “How can you think such evil thoughts?”

“They say a little DDT makes it taste like real Maotai.”

“You’ll kill somebody.”

“Not a chance. I’ll only add a drop, and it’s a big bottle. The worst that could happen is it’d rid them of roundworms.”

“What about your father?”

“He’s too tight-fisted to drink any himself.”

Jinju, suddenly agitated, threw back the covers and sat up; she stared at a New Year’s wall scroll with a cherubic boy in a red vest holding a large red peach like an offering in his hands.

“Ah, Deputy Yang, Elder Master, Father”—that had to be Cao Jinzhu; the thought sickened her—”try some of this good stuff my brother picked up at the horse market. They say it’s a little like Maotai, but since we’ve never tasted real Maotai, we can’t tell.”

Cao Jinzhu sniffled a time or two. “Our friend Eighth Uncle is the well-traveled one. If anyone’s tried it, he has.”

Deputy Yang laughed smugly. “Only a time or two. Once at the home of Party Secretary Geng, and once at Zhang Yunduan’s. Eighty yuan a bottle means nothing to someone as rich as Zhang.”

“Come on, Eighth Uncle, tell us if it tastes like Maotai,” Elder Brother urged.

Jinju heard him smack his lips; he’d taken a drink.

“Well?”

He must have taken another, since she heard him smack his lips again.

“Well, I’ll be damned, it does taste a little like Maotai.”

“Good stuff,” Father said. “Drink up.”

The cherubic boy on the wall looked down at Jinju as if he wanted to jump out of the picture.

Liu Jiaqing cleared his throat. “Father of the bride,” he said, “I hear the girl has quite a temper.”

“She’s just a girl,” Father said, “who doesn’t know what she’s doing half the time. She’s impetuous, but she’ll never get her way as long as there’s breath in my body.”

“It’s not unusual for someone that young to have a mind of her own,” Cao Jinzhu said. “Wenling’s the same. When she heard that Jinju wanted to terminate the agreement, she caused such a scene at home that her mother and I had to give her a beating.”