Mo Yan - Red Sorghum

Father, whose voice was changing, felt compelled to enter the fray: ‘You started it by stealing the guns we’d hidden in the well,’ he said in a raspy squeak. ‘We kidnapped him because you stole the dog pelts we’d hung on the walls to dry!’

He coughed up a gob of phlegm angrily and tried to spit it in the face of the Jiao-Gao officer, but it missed its mark and landed on the forehead of a tall, slightly hunchbacked Iron Society soldier, who lashed out as though he’d been shot: ‘Douguan, fuck your living mother!’

The prisoners laughed, even though their aching arms were turning numb from the ropes and their future was clouded.

But Granddad just sneered and said, ‘What the hell are you arguing about? We’re all a bunch of whipped soldiers.’

While the sound of Granddad’s words still hung in the air, Little Foot Jiang, his face the colour of ashes, fell to the ground. Blood and pus oozed from his injured foot, which had swollen to the size of a winter melon. The Jiao-Gao soldiers, held back by the ropes around them, could only look helplessly at their unconscious commander.

Just then the dapper Detachment Leader Leng strode out of his tent to join his men in inspecting the hundreds of rifles and two cases of wooden-handled grenades they’d captured from the Iron Society and the Jiao-Gao regiment. Twirling his whip, he walked smugly towards the prisoners. Father heard the sound of heavy breathing behind him, and he could picture the angry look on Granddad’s face. The corners of Detachment Leader Leng’s mouth curled upward, and the fine wrinkles about his cheeks wriggled like little snakes.

‘Have you thought about what I’m going to do with you, Commander Yu?’ he asked with a giggle.

‘That’s up to you!’ Granddad replied.

‘It would be a waste of a good man to kill him. But if I don’t, you might kidnap me again someday!’

‘Killing me won’t close my eyes!’

With a swift kick, Father sent a road apple flying into Detachment Leader Leng’s chest.

Leng raised his whip, then let it drop. ‘I hear this little bastard only has one nut. Somebody come over here and cut off the other one! That’ll keep him from biting and kicking!’

‘He’s just a boy, Old Leng,’ Granddad said. ‘Whatever you want to do you can do to me.’

‘Just a boy? The little bastard’s got more fight in him than a wolf cub!’

Little Foot Jiang, who had regained consciousness, struggled to his feet.

‘Commander Jiang,’ Detachment Leader Leng said, ‘what do you think I should do with you?’

‘Killing me will only bring you trouble, Detachment Leader Leng,’ Commander Jiang said with bold assurance, but with his face bathed in cold sweat. ‘The day will come when the people liquidate you for your monstrous crime of slaughtering noble fighters of the anti-Japanese resistance!’

‘You can pass the time here until I’ve had something to eat. I’ll deal with you then.’

The Leng soldiers sat around eating horsemeat and drinking sorghum wine.

Suddenly the sentry on the northern wall of the village fired a shot and ran into the village. ‘The Japs are coming — the Japs are coming!’

Detachment Leader Leng grabbed the sentry’s sleeve and asked angrily, ‘How many Japs? Are they real Japs or lackeys?’

‘I think they’re lackeys. Their uniforms are yellow. A whole line of yellow, running towards the village at a crouch.’

‘Lackeys? Kill the sons of bitches. Company Commander Qi, take your men up to the wall, and hurry!’ he ordered.

Then he turned to two guards with machine guns. ‘Keep an eye on them,’ he commanded. ‘Pop ’em if they act up!’ Surrounded by his bodyguards, he ran at a crouch towards the northern edge of the village.

Less than a quarter of an hour later, fighting broke out. The opening salvos of rifle fire were followed by machine-gun fire, and before long the air was filled with the shrieks of incoming projectiles that exploded in the village, sending shrapnel slamming into the village wall and the trunks of trees. Amid the din of shouting came the jiligulu of a foreign tongue.

It was real Japs after all, not lackeys. Detachment Leader Leng and his troops put up a stubborn defence, but abandoned their positions after half an hour of fighting and fell back to the cover of toppled walls.

Japanese artillery shells were already falling into the inlet. The anxious Jiao-Gao and Iron Society soldiers stomped their feet and ducked their heads. ‘Untie us!’ they bellowed angrily. ‘Fuck your living mothers! Untie us! If you came out of Chinese pricks, untie us. If you came out of Japanese pricks, then kill us!’

The guards ran to the stack of rifles and picked up two swords, with which they cut their prisoners’ ropes.

Eighty soldiers ran like madmen to the stack of rifles and the pile of hand grenades; then, ignoring the numbness of their arms and the hunger in their bellies, they charged the Japanese, yelling wildly as they ran straight into a hail of lead.

Several dozen columns of smoke rose from the village wall following the explosions of the first salvo of hand grenades thrown by the Jiao-Gao and Iron Society soldiers.

FULL PURPLE LIPS, like ripe grapes, gave Second Grandma — Passion — her extraordinary appeal. The sands of time had long since interred her origins and background. Her rich, youthful, resilient flesh, her plump bean-pod face, and her deep-blue, seemingly deathless eyes were buried in the wet yellow earth, extinguishing for all time her angry, defiant gaze, which challenged the world of filth, adored the world of beauty, and brimmed over with an intense consciousness. Second Grandma had been buried in the black earth of her hometown. Her body was enclosed in a coffin of thin willow covered with an uneven coat of reddish-brown varnish that failed to camouflage its wormy, beetle-holed surface. The sight of her blackened, blood-shiny corpse being swallowed up by golden earth is etched forever on the screen of my mind.

In the warm red rays of the sun, I saw a mound in the shape of a human figure rising atop the heavy, deeply remorseful sandbar. Second Grandma’s shapely figure; Second Grandma’s high-arching breasts; tiny grains of shifting sand on Second Grandma’s furrowed brow; Second Grandma’s sensual lips protruding through the golden-yellow sand… I knew it was an illusion, that Second Grandma was buried beneath the black earth of her hometown, and that only red sorghum grew around her gravesite.

Standing at the head of her grave — as long as it isn’t during the winter, when the plants are dead and frozen, or on a spring day, when cool southerly breezes blow — you can’t even see the horizon for the nightmarishly dense screen of Northeast Gaomi sorghum. Then you raise your gaunt face, like a sunflower, and through the gaps in the sorghum you can see the stunning brilliance of the sun hanging in the kingdom of heaven. Amid the perennially mournful sobs of the Black Water River you listen for a lost soul drifting down from that kingdom.

THE SKY WAS a beautiful clear blue. The sun hadn’t yet made an appearance, but the chaotic horizon on that early-winter morning was infused with a blinding red light when Old Geng shot at a red fox with a fiery torch of a tail. Old Geng had no peers among hunters in Saltwater Gap, where he bagged wild geese, hares, wild ducks, weasels, foxes, and, when there was nothing else around, sparrows. In the late autumn and early winter, enormous flocks of sparrows flew over Northeast Gaomi Township, a shifting brown cloud that rolled and tumbled above the boundless land. At dusk they returned to the village, where they settled on willows whose naked, yellowing limbs drooped earthward or arched skyward. As the dying red rays of the evening sun burned through the clouds, the branches lit up with sparrows’ black eyes shining like thousands of golden sparks. Old Geng picked up his shotgun, squinted, and pulled the trigger. Two sparrows crashed to the ground like hailstones as shotgun pellets tore noisily through the branches. Uninjured sparrows saw their comrades hit the ground and flapped their wings, rising into the air like shrapnel sent flying high into a lethargic sky.