Mo Yan - Sandalwood Death

“Dieh,” I said, “please let me sit in that chair just for a moment before they get here.”

“No,” he said, pulling a long face, “not yet.”

“Then when?”

“After we’ve completed the important task ahead of us.” The expression on his face had not changed, and I knew that was intentional. He was very, very fond of me, a boy everyone was drawn to. How could he not be? I went up behind him, wrapped my arms around his neck, and touched the back of his head with my chin. “Since you won’t let me sit in the Dragon Chair,” I said, “then tell me a Peking story before they get here.”

“I do that every single day,” he said, seemingly annoyed. “How many stories do you think there are?”

I knew his annoyance was just an act. Dieh enjoyed nothing more than telling me Peking stories. “Please, Dieh,” I said. “If you don’t have any new stories, tell me one of the old ones.”

“What’s so appealing about the old stories?” he said. “Have you never heard the adage ‘Repeat something three times, and not even the dogs will listen’?”

“I’ll listen even if the dogs won’t,” I said.

“What am I going to do with you, my boy?” He looked up at the sun. “We have a little time,” he said finally. “I’ll tell you a story about Guo Mao, how’s that?”

I have not forgotten a single story my dieh told me, not one of the hundred and forty-one. Each of them is packed away in my head, which has lots of drawers, like those cabinets in herbal pharmacies. Every story has a drawer of its own, and there are still lots of drawers left over. I started pulling out drawers, and found that none of them held a story about Guo Mao. Happy? I was thrilled! A new story! I pulled out the hundred and forty-second drawer, into which I would put the story of Guo Mao.

“During the Xianfeng reign in the mid-nineteenth century, a father and son showed up in Tianqiao. The father’s name was Guo Mao, or Guo the Cat. His son’s name was Xiaomao, or Kitten. Both father and son were accomplished mimics. Do you know what that is? It’s someone who uses his mouth to imitate all the different sounds in the world.”

“Could they imitate the cry of a cat?”

“Children mustn’t interrupt when grownups are talking! Anyway, father and son quickly gained a reputation as street performers in Tianqiao. When I heard about them, I sneaked over to Tianqiao, without telling Grandma Yu, and joined the crowd milling at the square. I was pretty small back then, and skinny, and I had no trouble squeezing my way up front, where I saw a boy sitting on a stool, holding a hat. I got there just in time for the performance to begin: a rooster crows behind a dark curtain, a sound that’s immediately echoed by dozens of roosters, near and far, some of them squeaky attempts by young birds still with fledgling feathers. The squawks are accompanied by the thup-thup of flapping wings. Then an old woman tells her husband and son that it is time to get up. The old man coughs, spits, lights his pipe, and bangs the bowl against the side of the heated bed. The boy snores on until she forces him to get out of bed, which he does, muttering and yawning noisily as he gets dressed. A door opens, and the boy goes outside to pee before fetching water to wash up. The old woman starts a fire in the stove with the help of a bellows, while the old man and the boy go out to the pigsty to catch one of the pigs, a noisy process. The pig crashes through the gate and starts running around in the yard, where it knocks over a water bucket and smashes a bedpan. Then it bursts into a henhouse, producing an uproar of squawks from the terrified chickens, several of which flap their way up onto a wall. The boy grabs the squealing pig by a hind leg and is joined by his father, who takes hold of the other hind leg and helps him pull the animal out of the henhouse. But its head is caught, which its shrill complaints vividly attest. In the end they tie its legs with a rope and carry it over to the slaughtering rack. The pig fights to get free. The boy whacks it over the head with a club. Agonizing squeals follow. Then the boy sharpens a knife on a whetstone, while his father drags over a clay basin to catch the blood. The boy buries the knife in the pig’s neck. The stuck pig squeals. Blood spurts, first onto the ground, then into the basin. After this, the woman brings out a tub of hot water, and the three of them busily debristle the animal. That done, the boy opens the pig’s belly and scoops out the internal organs. A dog comes up, steals a length of intestine, and runs off. The old woman curses the dog, managing a hit or two before it’s out of range. The man and his son hang the butchered meat on a rack. Customers come up to buy cuts of pork. There are older women, older men, young women, and children. After selling off the meat, father and son count their money before the family of three enjoy a meal of slurpy porridge… all of a sudden, the dark curtain parted and all anyone saw was a scrawny old man sitting on a stool. He was rewarded with enthusiastic applause. Then the boy got down off his stool and passed the hat. Coins rained down into the cap, except for those that landed on the ground. Your dieh saw it with his own eyes and did not make up any of it. The old adage holds true: ‘Every trade has its zhuangyuan.’”

Now that he had told his story, Dieh sat quietly with his eyes shut. But I was too enraptured to want to extract myself from the tale. It was yet another story about a boy and his father, and I could not help feeling that all his stories about a boy and his father were really about me and him. Dieh was the mimic, Guo Mao, and I was the boy who walked through the crowd, hat in hand— Meow meow~~mew~~

My dieh had performed countless executions in the capital to audiences of thousands, people who were drawn to his unparalleled skill, and it seemed to me that I could actually see tears in the people’s eyes. Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if I’d been there with Dieh at the time, hat in hand, a cat cap on my head, collecting donations from onlookers? While I was collecting money, I’d be practicing my cat cries ~~meow meow~~ and how wonderful that would be! Just think about all the money I’d get! I tell you, Dieh, why did you wait so long to come home and introduce yourself to your son? You could have taken me to the capital with you. If I’d been at your side ever since I was a boy, by now I’d be a man-slaying zhuangyuan…

When my dieh first showed up in town, people took me aside and whispered, “Xiaojia, your dieh isn’t human.” “What is he, then?” “He’s a ghost that has taken over a corpse and brought it back to life. Think about it, Xiaojia, before your mother died, did she ever say you had a father? No? Of course not. So your mother said nothing about a father on her deathbed, and then he shows up, like he’d dropped out of the sky or popped up out of the ground. What could he possibly be except a ghost?”

“Go fuck yourself!” Meow meow . I rushed those tongue-wagging bastards with a cleaver. I went without a dieh for more than twenty years, and now, by some miracle, I suddenly have one, and you people have the nerve to say not only that is he not my dieh, but that he’s a ghost. You’re as brazen as rats that’ll lick a cat’s ass. I raised my cleaver and ran at them. Meow meow . With one swing of my cleaver I could chop them in two, from their heads all the way down to their heels. My dieh said that particular chop is called the “big cleave,” and today I’m going to use it on any son of a bitch who has the guts to say my dieh isn’t really my dieh. Well, they nearly shit their pants when they saw the look of rage on my face, and could not get out of there fast enough. Meow meow , watch out, you bunch of long-tailed rats. Provoke my dieh, and you’re asking for trouble. The same goes for me. Meow meow . Come give it a try if you don’t believe me, any of you. My dieh is an executioner who sits in the Emperor’s chair. His Majesty gave him leave to report an execution after it had been carried out, to kill without constraints, man or dog. And when I take my place, knife in hand, at my dieh’s side, I can kill a man as easily as I can butcher a pig or a dog.