Mo Yan - Sandalwood Death

“May it please Your Excellency, the sentence has been carried out!”

The dark, fat official, who was still sitting astride his horse, waved his hand in the direction of the severed head, as if seeing off an old friend, then reined his horse around and clip-clopped away from the execution ground. Whoops of excitement burst from the crowd of onlookers, as the beggars boldly rushed up to the stand to await the moment when they could climb up and strip the man’s clothing off. Blood was still pumping from the corpse, which had pitched forward and was resting on the stump of its neck, conjuring up the image of an overturned liquor vat.

That was the moment everything became clear. The official witness to the execution was not my uncle, nor were the executioners or any of the soldiers. My uncle was the man whose head had just been lopped off.

That night I went looking for a willow tree with a low-hanging branch, and when I found it, I took the sash from around my waist, made a noose, tossed it over the branch, and stuck my head in. Dieh was dead, and so was Niang; and now my uncle, the only family member I had left, had just been beheaded. There wasn’t another soul in this world I could turn to. Ending my life now was the only answer. But at the very moment I was about to rub noses with King Yama of the Underworld, a huge hand grabbed me by the seat of my pants.

It was the man who had just beheaded my uncle.

He took me to a restaurant called The Casserole, where he ordered a plate of bean curd and fish heads. While I was eating—just me—he sat watching me. He didn’t even touch the tea the waiter had brought him. When I finished with a loud belch, he said:

“I was your uncle’s good friend, and if you are willing, you can be my apprentice.”

The impressive image he’d created earlier that day reappeared: standing tall and unmoving, then quickly turning slightly to the right, his right arm circling the air like a crescent moon, and swish —my uncle’s head was raised high in the air, accompanied by his scream of innocence… your grandmother’s voice sounded again in my ear, but now it was uncommonly gentle, and the sense of gratitude she felt was clear and sustaining.

“My dear son,” she said, “get down on your knees and kowtow to your shifu.”

I did that, and with tears in my eyes, though if you want to know the truth, my uncle’s death meant nothing to me. I was concerned only about myself. The cause of those hot tears was the realization that my daydream was about to come true. I wanted nothing more than to become a man who could lop off someone’s head without blinking. Those two men’s carriage and icy demeanor lit up my dreams.

Son, your dieh’s shifu was the man I’ve mentioned to you hundreds of times—Grandma Yu. He later told me that he had been sworn brothers with my jailer uncle, who had committed a capital crime, and that it had been his good fortune to die by his hand. Swish , faster than the wind. Grandma said that when his sword severed my uncle’s head, he heard it say:

“That is my nephew, Elder Brother. Watch over him for me!”

Meow, meow , I learned how to sound like a cat before I could talk. My niang said that the longest whisker on a tiger is precious, and that anyone who owns one can carry it on his body and see a person’s true form. All living humans, she said, are reincarnations of animals. If a person gets one of those precious whiskers, what he sees is not people. On the street, in alleyways, in taverns, in a public bath, what he sees are oxen, horses, dogs, cats, and the like. Meow, meow . There was once a man, Niang said, who traveled east of the Shanhai Pass, where he killed a tiger to get one of those precious whiskers. He was afraid of losing it, so he wrapped it in three outer and three inner layers, then sewed it into the lining of his padded jacket. When he returned home, his mother asked him, “Did you make your fortune during all those years you were away up north, son?” “My fortune? No,” he said proudly, “but I did lay my hands on a rare treasure.” He reached inside his jacket, tore open the lining, and removed the bundle, which he unwrapped to show her the whisker. But when he looked up, she’d vanished, her place taken by a nearsighted old dog. The poor man was so frightened by this that he ran outside and collided with an old horse carrying a hoe over its shoulder. The horse was puffing on a pipe and snorting streams of smoke from its flared nostrils. The man nearly died of fright at this encounter, and was about to run away when he heard the horse call out his childhood name: “Aren’t you Xiaobao? Don’t you even recognize your own dieh, you little bastard?” The whisker, that’s what made all this happen. He quickly rewrapped it and put it away. Now he could see that his dieh was not an old horse and his niang was not an old dog.

Getting one of those whiskers has long been a dream of mine. Meow, meow . I make this clear to everyone I know and ask people I meet if they can tell me where I can get one. Someone once said that the forests of the great Northeast are the best place. I was burning to go see, and would have if it hadn’t meant leaving my wife. A precious tiger’s whisker, just think how wonderful that would be! Well, I’d just put up a meat rack on the street when a huge boar in a long robe under a short jacket, wearing a black silk skullcap and carrying a thrush in a birdcage, sauntered up. “Two catties of pork, Xiaojia,” it said. “Give me a good weigh, and make it streaky pork.” There was no question that it was a boar standing in front of me, but the voice was that of Li Shizhai, Elder Li, the father of Graduate Li, a learned local scholar respected by all. If he didn’t get the respect he thought he deserved, he intoned in a loud voice, “A base man cannot be taught!” Who could have guessed that he’d actually be a boar? Even he didn’t know. No one but I knew. But if I told him, I’d get a taste of his dragonhead cane, for sure. The boar hadn’t even left when a white swan sashayed up carrying a bamboo basket on its wing. When it was right in front of me, it gave me a dirty look and said in a voice dripping with spite, “Xiaojia, you heartless fiend. I found a fingernail when I bit into the dog meat jelly you sold me yesterday. Are you selling human flesh and calling it dog meat?” It turned to the boar. “Did you hear what happened? Two nights ago, the Zheng family’s child bride was beaten to death. Her battered body was a mass of bruises!” Now that the swan had spewed its garbage, it turned back to me and said, “Give me two catties of dog meat jerky. We’ll try something different.” “Who do you think you are, you stinking bitch? A big-assed swan is what you are. I ought to turn you into swan jelly. That’d shut that mouth of yours once and for all.”