Mo Yan - Red Sorghum

‘Sew the blood vessels together.’

‘Commander Yu, nobody in the world can reconnect blood vessels….’

‘Then… is that the end of it?’

‘That’s hard to say, Commander Yu. He might still be all right. The other one’s just fine. Maybe he’ll be all right with just one….’

‘You think so?’

‘It’s possible.’

‘Damn it to hell!’ Granddad swore sorrowfully. ‘Bad things always happen to me!’

After the wound down below had been taken care of, Father’s face was attended to. Dr Zhang’s sweat-soaked clothing stuck to his back as he sat on a stool and panted breathlessly.

‘How much, Dr Zhang?’

‘Don’t worry about a fee, Commander Yu. As long as your esteemed son gets better, I consider myself lucky,’ he said weakly.

‘Dr Zhang, I, Yu Zhan’ao, am strapped at the moment. But someday I’ll thank you properly.’

He picked up Father and carried him out of Dr Zhang’s house.

Granddad looked down attentively at my father, who lay semiconscious in the shack, his face covered with gauze, with only his shifting eyes exposed. Dr Zhang had dropped by once to change his dressings. ‘Commander Yu,’ he said, ‘there’s no infection, and that’s a good sign.’

‘Tell me,’ said Granddad, ‘didn’t you say he’d be all right with just one?’

‘Commander, we can’t worry about that yet. Your esteemed son was bitten by a mad dog, and we’re lucky he’s still alive.’

‘He might as well be dead if that thing’s useless.’ Observing the murderous look in Granddad’s eyes, Dr Zhang mumbled something obsequious and slinked away.

Granddad picked up his gun and walked over to the marshland to sort out his chaotic thoughts. Mournful signs of autumn were all around: the ground was covered with frost, and there were sharp, icy brambles on the soggy marshland floor. Granddad was sick and very weak, his son was hovering between life and death, the family was broken up, some gone and some dead, the people were suffering, Wang Guang and Dezhi were dead, Gimpy had gone far away, the ulcer on the woman Liu’s leg was still oozing pus and blood, Blind Eye did nothing all day long but sit, the girl Beauty was too young to know anything, he was being pulled by the Jiao-Gao troops and squeezed by Pocky Leng’s troops, the Japanese saw him as their mortal enemy. He climbed to the top of a rise in the marshland to gaze out over the scattered, broken remains of human bodies and sorghum stalks, utterly disheartened. What had he got from decades of fighting and vying over women? Only the desolate scene in front of him.

The autumn of 1939 was one of the most difficult periods in Granddad’s life: his troops had been wiped out, his beloved wife had been killed, his son had been severely wounded, his home and the land around it had been torched, his body was racked with illness; war had destroyed nearly everything he owned. His eyes roamed over the corpses of men and dogs, a skein of threads getting more and more tangled wherever he looked, until it became a blur. Several times he drew his pistol, thinking of saying goodbye to this lousy, fucking world. But a powerful desire for revenge won out over cowardice. He hated the Japanese, he hated the troops of Pocky Leng and of Jiao-Gao.

On this very spot, the Jiao-Gao forces had taken over twenty rifles from him, then vanished without a trace. There was no sign that they’d engaged the Japanese; he had heard only that they’d clashed with the troops of Pocky Leng. And Granddad suspected that it was the Jiao-Gao forces who had stolen the fifteen rifles he and Father had hidden in the dry well.

The woman Liu, who still had a pretty face even in her forties, came to the edge of the marshland to find Granddad, trying to comfort him with affectionate gazes at his silver hair. She touched his arm with her large, rough hand and said, ‘You shouldn’t be sitting here thinking like that. Let’s go back. As the ancients said, “Heaven never seals off all the exits.” You should concentrate on getting your health back by eating and drinking and breathing as much and as hard as you can….’

Her words touched him. He looked up at her kind face and tears began to fill his eyes. ‘Sister-in-law,’ he moaned.

She stroked his bent back. ‘Just look,’ she said, ‘a man barely forty reduced to this by his suffering.’

She supported him as they walked back together. He looked at her lame leg and asked with concern, ‘Is it any better?’

‘The ulcer has healed, but it’s thinner than the other one.’

‘It’ll fill out later.’

‘I don’t think Douguan’s injury is as serious as it looks.’

‘What do you think, will he be all right with only one?’

‘I think so. Single-stalk garlic is always the hottest.’

‘You really think so?’

‘My younger brother-in-law was born with only one, and look how many kids he’s got.’

Late at night, Granddad rested his weary head in the warmth of the woman Liu’s bosom as she stroked his bony frame with her large hands. ‘Can you do it again?’ she whispered. ‘Do you still have the strength? Don’t despair. Doesn’t it make you feel better to do it to me…?’

Granddad smelled the slightly sour, slightly sweet odour of the woman Liu’s breath and fell fast asleep.

Mother could not rid her mind of the picture of Dr Zhang picking up that purplish, flattened ball with his tweezers. He had examined it carefully before tossing it into a dish filled with dirty cotton balls and pieces of skin and dead flesh. Yesterday it had been Douguan’s jewel; today it lay in a dish of filthy debris. Mother, who was fifteen and had begun to understand a thing or two, felt both bashful and frightened. While she was taking care of Father, she kept staring at his gauze-wrapped penis; her heart fluttered, her cheeks burned, she blushed deep red.

Then she learned that the woman Liu was sleeping with Granddad.

‘Beauty,’ the woman Liu said to her, ‘you’re fifteen now, and no longer a child. Try playing with Douguan’s penis; if it gets hard, he’s your man.’

Mother was so embarrassed she nearly cried.

Father’s stitches were removed.

Mother slipped into the shack where Father was sleeping and tiptoed up to his kang, her cheeks burning. She knelt beside him and carefully pulled down his pants. In the light streaming into the room she looked at his injured, grotesque penis. The head, wild and proud, had an air of defiance. Timidly she held it in her sweaty hand and felt it gradually get warmer and thicker. It began to throb, just like her heart. Father woke up and squinted at her. ‘Beauty, what are you doing?’

Mother shrieked in alarm, jumped to her feet, and ran out, bumping smack into Granddad in the doorway.

Granddad grabbed her by the shoulders and demanded, ‘What’s wrong, Beauty?’

Mother burst out crying, wrenched free of Granddad’s grip, and ran away.

Granddad rushed into the shack, then rushed out again like a man crazed and ran straight to the woman Liu. He grabbed her breasts and squeezed them tightly. ‘Single-stalk garlic is the hottest!’ he said almost incoherently. ‘Single-stalk garlic is the hottest!’

Granddad fired three shots in the air, then brought his hands together in front of his chest and screamed: ‘Heaven has eyes!’

GRANDDAD TAPPED THE wall with his knuckles. Sunlight streaming in through the window reflected off the Gaomi statuette on the highly polished kang table. The window was covered by paper that Grandma had cut into strange, ingenious designs. In five days everything in the place would be reduced to ashes in a terrible battle. It was the tenth day of the eighth lunar month, 1939. Granddad had just returned from the highway, his arm in a sling and reeking of gasoline. He and Father had buried the Japanese machine gun with the twisted barrel and were searching the house for the money Grandma had hidden.