Mo Yan - Red Sorghum

Black Eye just shrugged the shoulder Granddad had patted and screamed angrily at the people milling around the village wall, ‘Don’t stand so damned close! You women there, are you going to wear sackcloth head coverings or not?’

Five Troubles took a brass whistle out of his shirt and blew it three times. Fifty Iron Society soldiers scrambled out of tents near the willow grove and ran up to their tethered horses, which whinnied with excitement. The men were crack soldiers and carried light, excellent weapons: razor-sharp sabres in their hands and Japanese rifles slung over their backs. Five Troubles and four of his burliest men had Russian submachine guns. They mounted, closed ranks, and formed two tight columns. The horses trotted out of the village towards the bridge at the Black Water River. The hair fringing their hooves quivered in the morning breeze; silver light flashed from their glistening metal shoes. Five Troubles led on his powerful dappled colt. Father watched the horses gallop across the smooth black earth like a dark gathering cloud rolling off into the distance.

The funeral master, dressed in a Chinese robe and traditional overjacket, stood on a stool and shouted at the top of his lungs, ‘Drum-and-bugle corps —’

A drum-and-bugle corps in black uniforms with red caps squeezed through the crowd and ran over to the six-foot-high roadside bandstands, built of wood and reeds. They took their positions.

The funeral master raised his voice: ‘Ready —’

Horns and woodwinds took up sound and the excited people crushed forward, craning their necks to get a good look. Those behind pushed forward in waves, causing the rickety bandstands to creak and sway. The frightened musicians broke ranks, screaming like demons, and the oxen and donkeys tied to nearby trees raised a noisy complaint.

‘What now, Blackie?’ Granddad asked courteously.

Black Eye shouted, ‘Old Three, bring out the troops!’

Fifty or more Iron Society soldiers appeared at once. They prodded the crowd, by then out of control, with their rifles. It was impossible to calculate how many thousands of people had converged on the village to watch the funeral, but they simply overwhelmed the exhausted soldiers.

Black Eye whipped out his pistol and fired into the sky, then again, over the sea of black heads. When the soldiers also began firing wildly into the sky, the front ranks of the surging crowd scurried backward, while those behind kept pushing forward, leaving straight up as the only direction left for those caught in the middle; the crowd looked like a black inchworm in motion. Shrieking children were knocked to the ground. Musicians plunged off the swaying bandstands, their screams merging with those of the people being trampled to create the most piercing scream in a whirlpool of chaotic screams. At least a dozen old and infirm people were trampled to death in the stampede, and months later the rotting carcasses still drew flies.

The soldiers finally managed to quell the riot, and the hapless musicians returned to their bandstands. Realising the danger, most of the people headed to the outskirts to line the road to Grandma’s gravesite and wait for the procession to pass. Five Troubles ordered his troops to patrol the road.

The badly shaken funeral master stood on his tall stool and shouted, ‘Lesser canopy!’

Two Iron Society soldiers with white sashes around their waists carried up a small, sky-blue canopy, a yard tall, and rectangular, with a ridge down the middle and curled-up ends, like the heads of dragons. Inlaid pieces of glass the colour of blood formed the crown.

‘Host tablet, please!’ the funeral master shouted.

Mother once told me that a host tablet is used for the ghost of the deceased. Later on, I learned that the host tablet actually indicates the social status of the deceased at the time of the funeral, and has nothing to do with ghosts; its common name is ‘spirit tablet’. Leading the procession, amid the flags of the honour guard, it provides testimony of status. Grandma’s original host tablet had been burned to a cinder during the fire, and the black paint on the hurried replacement, carried by two handsome Iron Society soldiers, was still wet. The script read:

Born on the Morning of the Ninth Day of the Sixth Month in the Thirty-second Year of the Great Manchu Emperor Guangxu. Died at Midday on the Ninth Day of the Eighth Month in the Twenty-eighth Year of the Republic of China.

Daughter of the Dai Family, First Wife of Yu Zhan’ao, Guerrilla Commander from Northeast Gaomi Township, Republic of China, and Leader of the Iron Society. Age at Time of Death: Thirty-two. Interred in the Yang of White Horse Mountain and the Yin of Black Water River.

Grandma’s spirit tablet was draped with three feet of white bunting that lent it graceful solemnity. The Iron Society soldiers carefully placed it in the lesser canopy, then stood at attention beside the opening.

The funeral master shouted, ‘Great canopy!’

The drum-and-bugle corps struck up the music as a stately procession of sixty-four Iron Society soldiers carried in the large scarlet canopy, on which blue crowns the size of watermelons had been inlaid. The buzzing of the onlookers stopped, until the only sounds in the air were the sad strains of the musicians’ pipes and flutes and the anguished wails of mothers whose children had been trampled in the riot.

A solitary, repulsive horsefly flitted around Granddad’s injured arm, intent on getting at the clotted dark blood. It darted away when he swatted at it and flew around his head, buzzing angrily. The mournful sound of a brass gong seized his heart and called up a string of tangled memories from the fleeting past.

He was only eighteen when he murdered the monk, an act that forced him to flee his home and wander the four corners of the earth. By the time he returned to Northeast Gaomi Township at the age of twenty-two to become a bearer for the Wedding and Funeral Service Company, he had endured all the torments of the society of man, and had suffered the humiliation of sweeping streets in the red-and-black pants of a convict. With a heart as hard as fishbone and the physique of a gorilla, he had what it takes to become a formidable bandit. He carried with him always the humiliation of being slapped in the home of the Qi-family Hanlin scholar, an incident that occurred in Jiao City in 1920.

Golden rays of blazing light shone down on the musicians in the tilted bandboxes, their cheeks bouncing like little balls as they tooted away, sweat dripping from their faces. People stood on tiptoe to watch the funeral, and the light from hundreds of pairs of eyes settled like anxious moonbeams over real people and papier-mâché figurines inside the circle, over an ancient, resplendent culture, as well as a reactionary, backward way of thinking.

Father was wearing thick white knee-length mourning clothes, tied at the waist by a length of grey hemp, and a square mourning hat covered the shaved part of his scalp. The sour odour of sweat from the crowd and the smell of burned varnish from Grandma’s coffin fouled the air and made him weak-kneed. Grandma’s pitted coffin had grown hideous beyond belief: it lay on the ground, high at the front end and low at the rear, like a huge muddleheaded beast. Father had the feeling that at any moment it might stand up with a yawn and charge the black-massed crowds. In his mind the black coffin began to billow like a cloud, and Grandma’s remains, encased in thick wood and the dust of red bricks, seemed to form before his eyes. She had looked remarkably lifelike when Granddad dug up her grassy mound beside the Black Water River and raked up layer after layer of rotted sorghum stalks. Just as he would never forget the sight of Grandma looking up at the bright-red sorghum as she lay dying, he would also never forget the sight of her face as it came into view in her grave.