Mo Yan - The Garlic Ballads

“What for?” She raised her sweaty face. “I’m not tired. I just worry the baby might come.”

“Already?” he asked anxiously.

“I figure some time in the next couple of days. I hope it waits till the harvest is in, at least.”

“Do they always come when they’re due?”

“Not always. Xinghua was ten days late.”

They turned to look behind them, where their daughter sat obediently at the edge of the field, her sightless eyes opened wide. She was holding a stalk of garlic in one hand and stroking it with the other.

“Careful with that garlic, Xinghua,” he said. “Each stalk is worth several fen.”

She laid it down and asked, “Are you finished, Daddy?”

“We’d be in trouble if we were,” he said with a chuckle. “We wouldn’t earn enough to get by.”

“We’ve barely started,” her mother answered tersely.

Xinghua reached down to run her hand over the pile of garlic beside her. “Yi!” she exclaimed. “The pile’s really getting big. We’ll make lots of money.”

“I figure we’ll bring in over three thousand pounds this year. At fifty fen a pound, that makes fifteen hundred yuan.”

“Don’t forget the tax,” his wife reminded him.

Oh, right, the tax,” Gao Yang muttered. “Not to mention extra-high expenses. Last year fertilizer cost twenty-one yuan a sack. This year it’s up to twenty-nine ninety-nine.”

“They think it sounds better than thirty,” she grumbled.

“The government always deals in odd numbers.”

“Money’s hardly worth the paper it’s printed on these days,” his wife complained. “At the beginning of the year you could buy a pound of pork for one-forty, now it’s up to one-eighty. Eggs went for one-sixty a handful, and they were big ones. Now it’s two yuan, and they’re no bigger than apricots.”

“Everyone’s getting rich. Old Su from the business institute just built a five-room house. I almost died when I heard it cost him fifty-six thousand.”

“That kind never has trouble getting money,” his wife said. “But people like us, who scratch a living out of the earth, will still be poor thousands of years from now.”

“Count your blessings,” Gao Yang said. “Think back a few years ago, when we didn’t even have enough to eat. The past couple of years we’ve had good bleached flour for every meal, and our elders never had it that good.”

“You come from a landlord family, and you can still say your elders never had it as good as us?” his wife mocked him.

“What good did being landlords do them? They were too stingy to eat and too cheap to shit. Every fen went into more land. My parents suffered their whole lives. Mother told me once that before Liberation in ‘49, they would start each year with eight ounces of cooking oil, and have six left at the end of the year.”

“Sounds like some kind of magic to me.”

“Nope. She said that when they cooked a meal they’d wet a chop-stick in water before dipping it in the oil. Then for every drop of oil that stuck to the chopstick a drop of water remained in the bottle. That’s how you start out with eight ounces and end up with six.”

“People knew how to get by back then.”

“But their sons and daughters learned what suffering is all about,” Gao Yang said. “If not for Deng Xiaoping, the landlord label would have stuck to me.”

“Old Man Deng’s been in power for ten years now. I hope the gods let him live a few more.”

“Anyone that high-spirited is bound to live a long time.”

“What puzzles me is how senior officials can eat like kings, dress like princes, and have the medical care of the gods; then, when they reach their seventies or eighties and it’s time to die, off they go. But take a look at our old farmers. They work all their lives, raise a couple of worthless sons, never eat good food or wear decent clothes, and in their nineties they’re still out in the fields every day.”

“Our leaders have to deal with all lands of problems, while we con cera ourselves with working, eating, and sleeping, period. That’s why we live so long — we don’t wear our brains out”

“Then tell me why everyone wants to be an official and no one wants to be a peasant.”

“Being an official has its own dangers. One slip and you re worse off than any peasant could possibly imagine.”

A stalk of garlic snapped in two as she yanked it out of the ground. She whimpered.

“Be careful,” Gao Yang grumbled. “Each one’s worth several fen.”

“Why such a mean look?” His wife defended herself. “I didn’t do it on purpose.”

“I didn’t say you did.”

The police wagon passed through a red gateway and screeched to a halt, sending Gao Yang’s head sliding into the horse-faced young man. The scent of blood persisted, but the garlic smell was gone.

1.

She drifted in and out of consciousness as she lay across Gao Ma’s back, her arms wrapped tightly around his powerful neck. When they crossed Following Stream, leaving one county and entering another, she had sensed that all ties between her and the past, between her and her home, between her and her kin — if they still counted as such — had been cut with one stroke. She could no longer hear the shouts of her father and brother, but felt them on her back. Tipped with golden barbs, they danced in the air before flying across the river and snagging on the tips of jute bushes. With her eyes closed she could concentrate on the sound of Gao Ma’s body crashing through the jute field, so densely packed it stopped even the wind, creating the gentle sound of ocean waves.

The jute was restless, parting like water to allow passage through it, then closing up at once. There were moments when she felt as if she were in a little boat — something she never had in real life — and when she opened her eyes, she was treated to a blindingly colorful panorama. So she shut her eyes again and experienced comfort built upon a foundation of exhaustion. Gao Ma’s labored breathing sounded like the snorts of a thundering bull as he loped through the jute, an endless expanse of supple, yielding fetters against which they forged an unveering path — at least that’s how she felt. In her mind, an enormous, bronze-colored sun was sinking slowly in a shrouded sky at the tip of a chaotic universe. A cluster of unfamiliar words leapt into the air — she neither understood nor recalled where she’d seen them before — and vanished as quickly as they had appeared, leaving behind the stately presence of heaven and earth. The jute bent gendy in the cool dusk winds, then waved lighdy before slowly righting itself; it was like a scarlet sea. She and her man had been transformed into fish that had forgotten how to swim.

Jute, all you jute bushes, you re in his way, and in mine. Your green lips pout and your crafty, ebony eyes squint; you laugh with a strange mirthfulness, and you stretch your legs — smiling faces, treacherous limbs.

Gao Ma stumbled and fell headlong to the ground, and as his body broke her fall, she felt the jute give beneath her. A sea of it swelled and crashed over them like tidal waves, swallowing them completely. Not daring to open her eyes, she tried to will herself into a state of torpor. The sounds of the world were pushed far into the distance, until all her senses were filled to bursting with the tenderness of jute.