Mo Yan - The Garlic Ballads

He curled up in the corner, his back pressed against the damp wall. Someone darted past the window, and a small paper bundle landed at his feet. He picked it up, unwrapped it, and was treated to a wonderful smell. It was a fried onion roll — still warm — and he had to fight to keep from bawling like a baby. Taking care not to disturb the sleeping militiamen, he nibbled at the onion roll, carefully chewing and swallowing each tasty bite. He had never before realized how noisy people are when they eat; heaven looked after him, he thought, since he managed to finish the roll without waking his guards.

After finishing the onion roll, Gao Yang again felt that life was worth living. So he closed his eyes and slept for a couple of hours, until he had to piss. Then, neither daring nor caring to awaken the militiamen, he searched for a mouse hole in which he could quietly relieve himself. Unfortunately, the brigade buildings all had brick floors, and he couldn’t find even a good-sized crack, let alone a mouse hole. To his surprise he found an empty wine bottle, which served his purpose just fine. But he hadn’t figured on the noise — like tossing rocks into a canyon— and he held back as much as possible to keep from disturbing his guards. Froth spilled over the neck of the bottle long before it was full, so he stopped the flow to let it subside before continuing; he repeated the process — three times in all — until the bottle was brimming. Then, holding it by its neck, he placed it in the corner, where it caught the dim light of dawn just enough to highlight the label. Quickly realizing that the militiamen couldn’t miss it there, he moved it to another corner. Just as noticeable. So he put it on the windowsill. Even worse.

Just then one of them woke up. “What are you doing?”

His cheeks burned from embarrassment.

“Where’d you get that wine?”

“It’s not wine…. I … my …”

The militiaman laughed. “What a character!”

The police chief opened the door. When the guards told him about the wine bottle, he laughed.

“Go ahead, drink up,” the police chief said.

“Chief, I didn’t want to wake them up…. I wouldn’t have … I’ll dump it.” An embarrassed Gao Yang tried to talk and beg his way out of a bad situation.

“No need for that,” the smiling police chief said. “A man’s piss can clean the poisons out of his body. Go on, drink it.”

Suddenly exhilarated by a strangely wonderful emotion, he blurted out, “Uncle, it’s really a bottle of fine wine.”

The police chief grinned and exchanged looks with the two militiamen. “If it’s a fucking bottle of fine wine,” he said, “then drink it!”

Without another word, Gao Yang picked up the bottle and took a mighty swig. It was still warm, and on the salty side, but not bad, all in all. Tipping the bottle back a second time, he gulped about half of the remaining urine, then wiped his mouth with his sleeve as hot tears gushed from his eyes. With a smile frozen on his face, he said, “Gao Yang, oh Gao Yang, you bastard, how could you be so lucky? Who else could have the good fortune to feast on a delicious onion roll and wash it down with fine wine?”

He finished off the bottle, then sprawled out on the brick floor and cried his eyes out.

Later that day Party Secretary Huang came to tell him that the police had to deal with containing the floodwaters of the Sandy River, and hadn’t time to waste looking for the body of his mother, anyway. So he was fined two hundred yuan and released.

The roads were already a sea of mud when he trudged home at dawn, and it was raining again; large drops pelting him on the head felt wonderful. “Mother,” he thought aloud, “I wasn’t a filial son while you were alive, but at least I managed to give you a decent burial. The poor and lower-middle-class peasants go to the crematorium when they die, but not you. That makes it all worth it.”

As he turned into his yard he witnessed the roof of the three-room hut he called home slowly caving in, sending pockets of water and mud splashing in all directions. Then the whole thing collapsed with a roar, and there in front of him, all of a sudden, was the acacia grove and the roiling yellow water of the river that flowed behind his house.

He cried out for his mother and fell to his knees in the mud.

2.

Dawn came. He had, apparently, gotten a little sleep, but now he was sore all over. Fire seemed to shoot from his nose and mouth, both of which nearly ignited spontaneously from the superheated air. He shivered so violently that the metal springs of the cot creaked. Why do people shiver? That’s what I want to know — why do people shiver? A covey of little red girls ran and jumped and screeched and yelled on the ceiling, so flimsy that swirling gusts of wind easily bent them this way and that. One of them — naked, holding a bamboo staff — stood off by herself. “Isn’t that Xinghua?” he asked out loud. “Xinghua, get down from there this minute! If you fall, you’ll kill yourself!”

“I can’t get down, Daddy.” She began to cry. Large crystalline tears hung suspended in midair on the tips of her hair instead of falling to the floor.

A strong gust of wind swept the children away, and a gray-haired old woman slogged unsteadily through the roadside muck, a tattered blanket thrown over her shoulders, one shoe missing. She was mud-spattered from head to toe.

“Mother!” he screamed. “I thought you were dead!”

As he ran toward her, he felt his body grow lighter, until he was as insubstantial as the cluster of little girls. Buffeted by gusty winds, his body was stretched to several times its original length, and he had to hold on to the rails around him to keep his balance as he stood before his mother. She rolled her muddy eyes and gaped at him.

“Mother!” he exclaimed excitedly. “Where have you been all these years? I thought you were dead.”

She shook her head lightly.

“Mother, eight years ago all the landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad elements, and rightists had their labels removed, and land was parceled out to people who work the fields. I married a woman with a crippled arm and a good heart. She bore you a granddaughter and a grandson, so our line wont die out. We have a surplus of food, and if this year’s garlic crop hadn’t rotted before it could be sold, we’d even have some money saved up.”

Mother’s face underwent a metamorphosis, and a pair of wormy maggots slithered out of her muddy eye sockets. Once the initial shock had worn off, he reached over to pluck out the maggots; but when he touched her skin, a clammy chill streaked from the tip of his finger all the way to the core of his heart. At the same time a yellow fluid oozed from Mother’s body, and her flesh and sinews flew off in chunks in the wind, until only a bare skeleton stood before him. A fearful scream tore from his throat.

Shouts came from far away: “Hey, pal… say, pal… wake up! Are you possessed or something?”

Six blazing green eyes were fixed on him. A clawlike hand, covered with green fur, reached out, utterly terrifying him. The icy hand recoiled when it brushed his forehead, as if scalded.

The green claw-hand returned to cover his forehead, bringing terror and contentment at the same time.

“You’re sick, pal,” the middle-aged inmate said loudly. “You’re burning up with fever.” He covered Gao Yang with a blanket — almost tenderly — this same man who had forced him to drink his own piss. “I’d say it’s the flu, so you’ll have to sweat it out.”

His mind was in an upheaval, and he was shivering uncontrollably. Why do people shiver? he asked himself. Why do they have to do that? His cellmates came up and added the weight of their blankets to his. He was still shivering, setting the four blankets in sympathetic motion. One rode up until it covered his face and blocked out the light. The stench made him gasp. Sweat oozing from his pores had the lice squirming and leaping. He sensed the imminence of his own death, if not from the illness that gripped him, then from the stifling oppressiveness of piled-on blankets that felt like moth-eaten cowhides. Straining with all his might, he managed to lift the errant blanket from his face, and immediately felt like a man whose head has bobbed to the surface of a swamp. “Help me, you people — save me!” he screamed.