Mo Yan - The Garlic Ballads

About halfway up the slope, the moon made an appearance in the eastern sky, barely clearing the lowland way off in the distance. Gao Yang was familiar enough with the laws of nature to know that tonight’s moonrise was a tad later than last night’s, and that tonight’s moon was a tad smaller. It was sallow, with a hint of pink: there it was, a chewed-up, sallow, slightly pink, flimsy, turbid, feeble, sleepy half-moon, a tad smaller than the night before, and a tad larger than it would be tomorrow. Its beams were so frail they seemed to fall short of the sandy hill, the foliage, and the highway. He slapped the donkey on the sweaty ridge of its back; the wheels turned slowly on axles that squealed and protested from a lack of grease. Every once in a while Fourth Uncle sang a snatch of some bawdy popular tune, then just as abruptly stopped, with no discernible pattern. In reality, the moonbeams did reach them — what was dancing on the leaves around them if not moonlight? If that wasn’t moonlight shimmering on the crickets’ wings like slivers of glass, what was it? Who would deny that the warm scent of moonlight was mixed with the cold odor of garlic? A heavy mist hung over the lowland; light breezes swept over the outcroppings.

Fourth Uncle began swearing — hard to say if he was swearing at something or someone: “You child of a whore — dog spawn — as soon as you pull up your pants, you think you’re so respectable!” Gao Yang didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

Just then two blinding rays of light came at them from the top of the hill — high one moment, low the next; now left, now right, like a pair of pinking shears moving across fabric — followed by the urgent roar of an engine. Gao Yang wrapped his arms around his donkey’s cold, sweaty head and nudged it and the cart over to the side of the road. Framed in the light beams, Fourth Uncle’s cow looked like a scrawny rabbit. He jumped off his cart, grabbed the harness, and guided her to the side of the road. They both seemed to disintegrate in the light beams.

What happened next was a joke, a dream, a common shit, a leisurely piss.

Gao Yang would later recall that the car barreled down on them like an avalanche, making violent, crunching noises, as the darkness swallowed up Fourth Uncle’s cow, his cart, his garlic, and him. Standing there wide-eyed, Gao Yang saw two middle-aged faces frozen behind a windshield: one fat, puffy, and smiling; the other skinny and twisted in a grimace. Gao Yang and his donkey were nearly smothered by the car’s heat.

He would recall watching the car surge toward them, hearing Fourth Uncle’s cow bellow, and seeing Fourth Uncle wrap his arms around the animal’s neck. Fourth Uncle’s head shrank in size until it looked like a tiny metallic bead reflecting yellow and blue light. Fourth Uncle, his eyes mere slits, his mouth a gaping hole, looked terrified and pathetic. The white light shone right through his protruding ears. With unhurried inevitability the car’s bumper smashed into the legs of Fourth Uncle and his cow, driving his torso forward for an instant before he was airborne, his arms outstretched like wings, his shirt flapping behind him like tailfeathers. He landed in a clump of wax reeds. As her neck twisted, his cow fell to the ground on her belly The car kept coming. After pushing the cow and the cart ahead of it a short distance, it ran up over them.

And then? Then the fat man shouted, “Let’s get out of here!” The skinny man tried to back the car up but couldn’t. Jamming the pedal to the floor, he lurched backwards. Then he spun the car around, skirted the spot where Gao Yang was standing with his donkey, and sped down the hill, leaving puddles of water from a punctured radiator — a wet, leaky, short trip.

With his arms still wrapped around his donkey’s head, Gao Yang tried to figure out what had happened. He reached up and felt his own head. It was still whole. Nose, eyes, ears, mouth: all right where they should be. Then he examined the donkey’s head; it was also in fine shape, except for its ears, which were icy cold. He broke down and cried like a baby.

1.

On the second night of her incarceration, Fourth Aunt dreamed that a blood-spattered Fourth Uncle stood at the foot of her bed. “Why aren’t you trying to clear your husband’s name and avenge his death instead of sitting around eating prepared food and enjoying a life of leisure?” “Husband,” she replied, “I cannot clear your name or avenge your death, for I have become a criminal.” “Then there’s nothing to be done, I guess,” Fourth Uncle said with a sigh. “I stashed two hundred yuan in a crack between the second row of bricks under the window. When you get out of jail, use a hundred of it to buy me a replica of the National Treasury and fill it with all manner of riches. The world of darkness is the same as the world of light — to get anything done you have to find a back door somewhere, and everything takes money.” Reaching up to wipe his bloody face, Fourth Uncle turned and walked slowly away.

The specter frightened Fourth Aunt awake; her bedding, hard and rough as armor plating, was soaked with cold sweat. The tragic, bloody image of Fourth Uncle swayed before her eyes, terrifying and saddening her at the same time. Is there really a nether world? she wondered. When I get home, I’ll knock out the second row of bricks under the window, and if there’s two hundred yuan there, that means there is a nether world. I mustn’t divulge any of this to my sons, since those two bastards seem to be trying to outdo each other in the pursuit of evil.

The mere thought of her sons made Fourth Aunt sigh. Her cellmate, whose thoughts were on her own son, also sighed. She had been taken out for more questioning that evening, and when they brought her back, she flopped down on her cot and cried awhile, then lay there as if in a trance. Asleep now, she was snoring loudly — fast one moment, slow the next, as if dreaming.

For Fourth Aunt sleep was out of the question. Her husband still had not returned from selling the garlic. A bat flew in through the window, circled the room a time or two, then flew back out. The boundless darkness of night harbored scattered dreamlike mutterings and the ominous squawks of parakeets. She got up, threw her jacket over her shoulders, and walked into the yard. Amid the eerie squawks of her neighbor’s parakeets, she gazed up at the stars and the waxing half-moon. It was past midnight, and she was worried.

“Yixiang,” she had said to her son after dinner, “aren’t you going out to meet your father?”

“What for?” he replied. “If he’s not coming home, what good would going out to meet him do? And if he is, what harm would not going out to meet him do?”

Fourth Aunt was speechless. “I wonder why we ever took the trouble to raise you,” she said after a while.

“I didn’t ask you to. You should have stuffed me down the septic tank when I was born and let me drown. That way you could have spared me years of grief.”

Choked with sobs, Fourth Aunt sat on the edge of the kang and let her tears flow. Her shadow spread across the floor, painted by yellow moonlight.