Yan Lianke - Dream of Ding Village

Grandpa watched my father walk away until he was just a blur in the distance, a shrunken figure at the school gate.

Then, his face covered in perspiration, Grandpa began retracing his steps to the stage, stopping only when he stood face to face with Ma Xianglin. The musician seemed not to have moved at all: he was rooted to the same spot on the stage. Grandpa turned to the villagers, likewise frozen in their places. He gazed at them for a moment before falling to his knees with a thump. In a voice loud enough for everyone to hear, Grandpa proclaimed, ‘As you can see, I’m not a young man. I kneel before you now, in my sixtieth year, to apologize to everyone on behalf of my oldest son, Ding Hui. I know a lot of you got infected from selling him your blood, and he is to blame for that. But please remember that my youngest boy has the fever too, and my twelve-year-old grandson died after being poisoned. Seeing as how it is come to this, I hope you can find it in your hearts to forgive us.’

Leaning forward, my grandfather knocked his head against the boards of the stage. ‘Please accept my apology. I beg you not to hold a grudge against our family.’

Thwack. Grandpa struck his head upon the stage a second time. ‘I know I let everyone down. I was the one who told you that blood is like a natural spring, that the more you take, the more it flows.’

Thwack. The third and final kowtow. ‘I also want to apologize for helping the government organize the trip to Cai county. The trip that started everyone selling their blood, and sold you into the sickness you are suffering from today.’

After the first apology, several of the villagers jumped on the stage and tried to lift Grandpa up. ‘There’s no need for this,’ they told him. ‘There’s really no need.’ But Grandpa managed to shake them off and perform the final two kowtows, thus completing the ritual. When he was finished, he rose to his feet like a man who had fulfilled a vow, or made good on a long-overdue promise.

Grandpa gazed at the large crowd of villagers like a teacher surveying a classroom full of students. They looked back at him expectantly, as if waiting for him to announce the start of class.

‘Beginning tomorrow,’ Grandpa announced in his most professorial tone, ‘anyone who is sick can come and live in the village school. Now, I know the village hasn’t had a cadre in years, but if you’re willing to put your trust in me, I promise that I’ll take care of you. You’ll be fed and housed at the school. I’ll make an appointment with the higher-ups to ask for a food subsidy. Just say the word and I’ll get you anything you need. And if you don’t think I’m working hard enough on your behalf, you can go to my sons’ houses and poison their pigs, their chickens, and any children they have left.’

‘I might as well tell you the truth,’ Grandpa continued. ‘The higher-ups never said there were any new medicines that could cure the fever. What they told me is that the fever is really AIDS, and that it’s a contagious disease, like the plague. Even the government doesn’t have a cure. It’s a new disease, and once you get infected, it’s fatal. If you’re not afraid of passing it on to your families, you can stay at home with them. But if you’re worried about infecting them, you are welcome to come and live at the school, and leave your families at home where they will be safe.’

Grandpa paused for a moment and scanned the crowd of villagers. Just as he was about to continue his speech, there was a thudding sound behind him, like a wooden pillar crashing on stage. Grandpa turned around to see that Ma Xianglin had toppled from his stool, his neck twisted at an unnatural angle, his face as white as a funeral scroll. His fiddle lay on the ground beside him, its strings still vibrating from the fall.

When Grandpa had announced that there weren’t any new medicines, Ma Xianglin had collapsed. Tiny streams of blood trickled from his mouth and nostrils.

The schoolyard filled with the stench of blood. Ma Xianglin was gone. He had died on the only stage where he had sung.

Grandpa helped Ma Xianglin’s wife make the burial arrangements. He even commissioned an out-of-town artist to paint a portrait of the musician. The artist, of course, knew nothing about the fever that had hit Ding Village, and Grandpa didn’t bother to tell him. The funeral portrait was a scroll painting showing Ma Xianglin with his eyes closed, immersed in his music, giving the performance of a lifetime to an enormous audience. Thousands of people watched in fascination, listened in rapture as Ma Xianglin sang his songs and played his fiddle. The portrait was crowded with faces. People perched on the wall of the schoolyard or high up in the branches of trees. It was quite a crowd, a sea of humanity. It resembled a temple fair, with vendors plying the crowds, selling sweet potatoes and candied apples on sticks. The portrait looked like a fun place to be.

At the funeral, they rolled up the scroll and placed it in Ma Xianglin’s coffin, alongside his beloved fiddle.

That was how they buried Ma Xianglin, with his favourite instrument and his finest moment.

Then they nailed down the coffin and put him in the ground.

After Ma Xianglin’s funeral, the sick began flocking to the village school. Some came just for their meals; others moved in for good.

Winter came, and with it the cold, and the first snowstorm. It fell with a fury, as thick as goose down, carpeting everything in white. The world turned white almost overnight. The plain became a sheet of crisp white paper upon which the villages were sketched, with people and animals dotting the landscape.

As the weather grew colder, sick villagers with nowhere else to go were only too glad to move into the village school. What had once been an elementary school and before that, a temple dedicated to Guan Yu, the Chinese god of good fortune, now became a hospice for people with the fever. The coal, firewood and kindling formerly used to heat classrooms now warmed makeshift dormitories, drawing even more sick villagers to the school.

One day, during a visit to the school, Li Sanren, the former village mayor, whose fever had become quite serious, decided he didn’t want to go home. Li Sanren had been living at home with his wife. Although she cooked his meals, made his bed, washed his clothes and boiled his medicinal herbs, he found her standard of care lacking.

‘Professor Ding,’ he said, a smile lighting up his sickly face, ‘what do you say I come and live here, at the school?’

And that’s exactly what he did. Li Sanren went home and fetched his bedroll, said goodbye to his wife and moved into his new lodgings at the school. Life in the schoolhouse was, if anything, better than his life at home: the walls were thicker, not nearly so draughty, and there was always plenty of firewood. Some of his meals he took with Grandpa; others he cooked for himself in a small upstairs room.

Winter settled in.

The early days of winter brought another death to the village, this time a woman who had been infected despite never having sold a drop of blood. Wu Xiangzhi was only thirty when she died, and barely twenty-one when she’d married Ding Yuejin, a relative of ours. Wu Xiangzhi was a delicate thing, a timid sort of girl who fainted at the sight of blood. For this reason, her husband had always pampered her.

‘I’d rather die than let my wife sell blood,’ he’d say. ‘I’d sooner sell all the blood in my veins than let my woman get involved in such a dirty trade.’ Yet the husband who had sold his blood was still alive and well, while his wife was dead in her grave. Several years earlier they had lost a baby daughter to the fever, the infant who Wu Xiangzhi had nursed. The villagers could scarcely believe it. Was this the way the fever spread, was this how whole families got infected?