Mo Yan - Red Sorghum

The Japanese cavalryman dragged his pain-racked body over to Father, where he grabbed the two halves of the plastic wallet. Blood dripped from the tips of his yellow fingers. As he clumsily tried to fit the two halves of his wife and son together with his usable hand, his dry, chapped lips quivered, his teeth chattered, and broken fragments of words emerged: ‘ Aya… wa… tu… lu… he… cha… hai… min… ’

Two streaks of glistening tears carved a path down his gaunt, grimy cheeks. He held the photograph up to his lips and kissed it, a gurgling sound rising from his throat.

‘You goddamn bastard, so you can cry, too? Since you know all about kissing your wife and child, why go around murdering burs? You think that if you squeeze out a few drops of stinking piss I won’t kill you?’ Granddad screamed as he raised the glinting blade of the Japanese sword over his head.

‘Dad —’ Father screamed, grabbing Granddad’s arm with both hands. ‘Dad, don’t kill him!’

Granddad’s arm shook in Father’s grasp. With teary, pity-filled eyes, Father pleaded with Granddad, whose heart had been hardened so much that killing had become commonplace.

As Granddad lowered his head, the wind carried a barrage of earthshaking thuds from Japanese mortars and the crackle of machine-gun fire raking the ranks of village defenders. From deep in the sorghum field they heard the shrill whinnies of Japanese horses and the heavy pounding of their hooves on the dark soil. Granddad shook his arm violently, tossing Father aside.

‘You little shit, what the hell’s got into you?’ he lashed out. ‘Who are those tears for? For your mother? For Uncle Arhat? For Uncle Mute and all the others? Or maybe it’s for this no-good son of a bitch! Whose pistol brought him down? Wasn’t he trying to trample you and slice you in two with his sword? Dry your tears, son, then kill him with his own sword!’

Father backed up, tears streaming down his face.

‘Come here!’

‘No — Dad — I can’t —’

‘Fucking coward!’

Granddad kicked Father, took a step backward, and raised the sword over his head.

Father saw a glinting arc of steel, then darkness. A liquid ripping sound blotted out the thuds of Japanese mortars, pounding Father’s eardrums and tying his guts into knots. When his vision returned, the handsome young Japanese cavalryman lay on the ground sliced in half. The blade had entered his left shoulder and exited on the right, beneath his ribs. His multicoloured innards writhed and quivered, emitting a steamy, powerful stench. Father felt his own intestines twist and leap into his chest. A torrent of green liquid erupted from his mouth. He turned and ran.

Although Father didn’t have the nerve to look at the Japanese cavalryman’s staring eyes beneath those long lashes, he couldn’t escape the image of the body lying there sliced in two. With one stroke of the sword, Granddad seemed to have cut everything in two. Even himself. The grotesque illusion of a blood-soaked sword glinting in the sky suddenly flashed in front of Father’s eyes, slicing people in two, as if cleaving melons: Granddad, Grandma, Uncle Arhat, the Japanese cavalryman and his wife and child, Uncle Mute, Big Liu, the Fang brothers, Consumptive Four, Adjutant Ren, everyone.

Granddad threw the sword to the ground and took off after Father, who was running blindly through the sorghum. More Japanese cavalry troops bore down on them; mortar shells shrieked through the sky above the sorghum field and exploded among the men stubbornly defending their village with shotguns and homemade cannons.

Granddad caught up with Father, grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, and shook him hard. ‘Douguan! Douguan! You little bastard! Have you gone crazy? What do you want, to crawl into a hole somewhere and die?’

Father clawed at Granddad’s powerful hands and shrieked, ‘Dad! Dad! Dad! Take me home. Take me home! I don’t want to fight any more. I don’t want to fight! I saw Mom! I saw Master! I saw Uncle!’

Granddad slapped him hard across the mouth. Father’s neck snapped to the side and went limp from the force of the blow. His head rolled against his chest; a bloody froth oozed from the corner of his mouth.

WHEN THE JAPANESE troops withdrew, the full moon, thin as a paper cutout, rose in the sky above the tips of the sorghum stalks, which had undergone such suffering. Grain fell sporadically like glistening tears. A sweet odour grew heavy in the air; the dark soil of the southern edge of our village had been thoroughly soaked by human blood. Lights from fires in the village curled like foxtails, as occasional pops, like the crackling of dry wood, momentarily filled the air with a charred odour that merged with the stifling stench of blood.

The wound on Granddad’s arm had turned worse, the scabs cracking and releasing a rotting, oozing mixture of dark blood and white pus. He told Father to squeeze the area around the wound. Fearfully, Father placed his icy fingers on the discoloured skin around the suppurating wound and squeezed, forcing out a string of air bubbles that released the putrid smell of pickled vegetables. Granddad picked up a piece of yellow spirit currency that had been weighted down by a clod of earth at the head of a nearby gravesite and told Father to smear some of the salty white powder from the sorghum stalks on it. Then he removed the head of a cartridge with his teeth and poured the greenish gunpowder onto the paper, mixed it with the white sorghum powder, and took a pinch with his fingers to daub on the open wound.

‘Dad,’ Father said, ‘shall I mix some soil into it?’

Granddad thought for a moment. ‘Sure, why not?’

Father bent down and picked up a clod of dark earth near the roots of a sorghum stalk, crumbled it in his fingers, and spread it on the paper. After Granddad mixed the three substances together and covered the wound with them, paper and all, Father wrapped a filthy strip of bandage cloth around it and tied it tight.

‘Does that make it feel better, Dad?’

Granddad moved his arm back and forth. ‘Much better, Douguan. An elixir like this will work on any wound, no matter how serious.’

‘Dad, if we’d had something like that for Mother, she wouldn’t have died, would she?’

‘No, she wouldn’t have….’ Granddad’s face clouded.

‘Dad, wouldn’t it’ve been great if you’d told me about this before? Mother was bleeding so much I kept packing earth on the wounds, but that only stopped it for a while. If I’d known to add some white sorghum powder and gunpowder, everything would have been fine….’

All the while Father was rambling, Granddad was loading his pistol. Japanese mortar fire raised puffs of hot yellow smoke all up and down the village wall.

Since Father’s Browning pistol lay under the belly of the fallen horse, during the final battle of the afternoon he used a Japanese rifle nearly as tall as he was; Granddad used his German automatic, firing it so rapidly it spent its youth and was ready for the trash heap. Although battle fires still lit up the sky above the village, an aura of peace and quiet had settled over the sorghum fields.

Father followed Granddad, dragging his rifle behind him as they circled the site of the massacre. The blood-soaked earth had the consistency of liquid clay under the weight of their footsteps; bodies of the dead merged with the wreckage of sorghum stalks. Moonlight danced on pools of blood, and hideous scenes of dismemberment swept away the final moments of Father’s youth. Tortured moans emerged from the field of sorghum, and here and there among the bodies some movement appeared. Father was burning to ask Granddad to save those fellow villagers who were still alive, but when he saw the pale, expressionless look on his father’s bronze face, the words stuck in his throat.