Mo Yan - Sandalwood Death

“Heavenly beings, transform me into an egret, then do the same with Master Qian… with humans there are high and low, noble and base. But all birds are equal. I beg you, heavenly beings, let my neck entwine with his until we form a red rope. Let me cover his body with kisses, every inch and every pore. What I long for is his kisses covering my body. Oh, that I could swallow him whole, and be swallowed whole by him. Heavenly beings, let our necks entwine for all time, let us fan our feathers like a peacock’s tail… I can imagine no greater pleasure, nor any more profound gift…”

Her feverish face wilted the grass beneath it; her fingers dug so deeply into the mud that she was pulling up roots.

Then she stood up and walked toward the birds as if in a stupor, a radiant smile creasing her mud-and-grass-covered face. She held out her white silk scarf, which billowed slightly in a breeze. Her thoughts took flight.

“Birds,” she murmured, “birds, give me a drop of your blood. One drop, no more, and make my dream come true. I am you, birds, and you are him. Letting him know what is in my heart is knowing what is in your hearts, so let our hearts beat as one. All I ask, birds, is some of your happiness, just a little. I am not greedy; a tiny bit will do. Won’t you take pity on me, birds, a woman whose heart has been seared by love?”

The egrets abruptly spread their wings and took off together, four strange, rail-thin legs breaking the mirrored surface of the pond in what some might have seen as awkward and others as nimble steps that left tiny ripples in their wake. Faster and faster they ran, their strength increasing, each step producing a sound like crackling glaze and sending modest sprays of water into the air. Once their legs were as straight as they would ever be, they fanned out their feathered wings, lifted their tails, and were airborne. Flying. At first they skimmed the surface, and then began to settle, reaching a spot opposite the pond, where now they were nothing but white blurs… Her legs had sunk into the loose mud, as if she had been standing there for a millennium… deeper and deeper, until the mud was up to her thighs and she felt her heated buttocks sitting on the cool mud…

Xiaojia rushed up and pulled her out of the mud.

For a very long time Meiniang was deathly ill, but even after the sickness passed, her longing for Magistrate Qian hung on. Aunty Lü slipped her a packet of yellow powder and said sympathetically:

“Child, having taken pity on you, the Fox Fairy has asked me to give you this love-lost powder. Take it.”

With her eyes fixed on the powder, she asked:

“Aunty Lü, what is it?”

“I’ll tell you after you take it. That is the only way it will be effective.”

So she dumped the powder into a bowl, added water and stirred it, and then, holding her nose, swallowed the foul-smelling stuff.

“Tell me, child,” Aunty Lü said, “do you really want to know what it is?”

“Yes, I do.”

“I’ll tell you, then,” she said. “Your aunty is too soft-hearted to see a vivacious young beauty like you come to grief, so I have conjured up my ultimate power. The Fox Spirit disapproves of my decision, but you are too far gone for it to save you. What I have come up with is a secret passed down from my ancestors, one that can be applied only to daughters-in-law, never to daughters. I will hold nothing back from you. What you just drank was distilled from the feces of your beloved. It was absolutely genuine, and very costly, not a cheap imitation. It was not easy to get my hands on it, I can assure you. I paid Magistrate Qian’s chef, Hu Si, three strings of cash to fetch it from the master’s privy. After baking it on a clay tile, I ground it into powder, then added croton seed and Chinese rhubarb to create a powerful medicine that can relieve internal heat. Believe me, I did not prepare this lightly. You see, the Fox Spirit told me that this method can shorten the practitioner’s life. But I felt so sorry for you that I was willing to give up a couple of years of my life. Child, there is one lesson you must take from ingesting this nostrum, and that is that the excretions from even a great man like Magistrate Qian are foul and smelly…”

Before Aunty Lü had finished her monologue, Sun Meiniang bent over and vomited, and kept vomiting till all that came up was green bile.

With this difficult episode behind her, clarity slowly returned to Meiniang’s mind, which had been mired in lard. While her longing for Magistrate Qian lingered on, it was no longer an obsession. The wounds to her heart were still painful, but scabs had formed. Her appetite returned: salt now tasted like salt, and sugar was sweet again. And her body was on the mend. This baptism of love, which had rocked her to her soul, had taken a toll on her seductiveness and replaced it with innocence and purity. But sleep remained evasive, especially on moonlit nights.

The moonbeams were like sands of gold and silvery powder. Xiaojia was sprawled on the kang, fast asleep and filling the room with thunderous snores. She walked into the yard, where moonbeams washed over her naked body. Lingering feelings of dejection diminished the sensation, as the source of her illness lost no time in producing fresh new sprouts. Qian Ding, ah, Qian Ding! Magistrate Qian, my star-crossed lover, when will you realize that somewhere there is a woman who cannot sleep because of you? When will it dawn on you that there exists a body as ripe as a juicy peach just waiting for you to enjoy it? Bright moon, you are a woman’s divinity, her best friend. The heavenly matchmaker of legend, is that not you? If it is, then what is keeping you from delivering a message for me? If it is not, then which constellation is in charge of love between a man and a woman? Or which earthbound deity? Just then a white night bird flew out from the moon and perched on a parasol tree in a corner of the yard. Her heart began to race. Oh, moon, you are, after all, the heavenly matchmaker. Though you have no eyes, there is nothing on earth that escapes your vision. Though you have no ears, you can hear whispers in the darkest rooms. You have sent down this feathered messenger after hearing my prayer. What kind is it, this great bird? Its pristine white feathers sparkle in your moonbeams; its eyes are like gold, white inlaid with yellow. It has perched on the highest and finest branch of the tree and is gazing down at me with the loveliest, most intimate look in its eyes. Bird, oh, bird, magical bird, you with a beak carved from white jade, use it to deliver my yearnings—hotter than a raging fire, more persistent than autumn rain, and more thriving than wild grass—to the man I love. If only he knew what was in my heart, I would willingly climb a mountain of knives or leap into a sea of fire. Tell him I would be happy to be a door threshold on which to scrape his feet, and that I would be content to be the horse on which he rode, whipping it to make it run fast. Tell him I have eaten his feces… Eminence, dear Eminence, my brother my heart my life… Bird, oh, bird, don’t waste another second, fly away, for I am afraid my yearnings and feelings may be too much for you to carry. They are like the flowers on that tree, soaked with my blood and my tears to give off my fragrance. Each flower represents one of my intimate utterances, and there are thousands of those on that one tree. My darling… Sun Meiniang, her face awash in tears, fell to her knees beneath the parasol tree and gazed at the bird perched at the top. Her lips trembled as a jumble of indecipherable words poured from between those red lips and the white teeth behind them. Her sincerity was so moving that the bird cried out as it spread its wings and disappeared without a trace in the moonlight, like ice melting in water or rays of light overwhelmed by bright flames.