Mo Yan - Sandalwood Death

A pounding at the gate startled her out of her crippling infatuation. She ran back into the house and dressed quickly, then, with no shoes on her big feet, ran across the muddy ground to the gate, where, with her hand held over her pounding heart, she asked in a shaky voice:

“Who is it?”

She hoped, nearly prayed, for a miracle, that the person on the other side of the gate was the beneficiary of her impassioned sincerity, the one the gods had linked to her by a red thread. He had come to her in the moonlight. It was all she could do to keep from falling to her knees and praying for her dream to come true. But the person outside the gate called her name softly:

“Meiniang, open the gate.”

“Who are you?”

“It’s your dieh.”

“Dieh? What are you doing here at this late hour?”

“Don’t ask, daughter, your dieh is in trouble. Open the gate!”

After hurriedly sliding back the bolt, she opened the squeaky gate for Northeast Gaomi Township’s famous actor, Sun Bing—who fell heavily to the ground.

Moonlight revealed patches of blood on her dieh’s face. His beard, which had been the loser in a contest not long before, but had not been torn out completely, was now reduced to a few scraggly strands curled up on his bloody chin.

“What happened?” she asked in alarm.

She ran inside and woke up Xiaojia to help her dieh over to the kang, where she pried open his mouth with a chopstick and poured in half a bowlful of water. He came to, and the first thing he did was reach up to feel his chin. He burst into tears, like a little boy who has been bullied. Blood continued to ooze from his injured chin, staining the few remaining hairs, which she removed with a pair of scissors before daubing on a handful of white flour. His face had undergone a transformation; he now resembled a very strange creature.

“Who did this to you?” Meiniang demanded.

Green sparks seemed to shoot out of his tear-filled eyes. His cheek muscles tensed; his teeth ground against each other.

“It was him, it had to be him. He was the one who pulled out my beard. He won the contest, why couldn’t he let it go at that? He pardoned me in front of everyone, said I didn’t have to do it, but then he carried out his revenge in secret. Why? He’s more vicious than a viper, a marauding blight on humanity!”

At that moment, her lovesickness was suddenly cured, and as she pondered her dazed and confused thoughts over the past several months, she felt both shame and remorse. It was almost as if she had conspired with Qian Ding to rip out her own father’s beard. Magistrate Qian, she said to herself, you are a mean and sinister man, someone to whom justice means nothing. What made me think that you were a tolerant, loving people’s Magistrate, instead of a cruel and ruthless thug? So what if I hovered between human and ghost because of you? That was my fault for demeaning myself. But what gave you the right to treat my father with such cruelty after he publicly acknowledged his defeat? When you pardoned him in front of everyone, I was so moved that I got down on my knees and let you tear my heart to shreds. That gesture earned for you a reputation of magnanimity, while all the time you planned to seek revenge in secret. How could I have let myself become besotted by a beast in human form, a true scoundrel? Do you have any idea what sort of life I have lived over the past few months? It was a simple question that produced both sadness and anger in her. Qian Ding, I will one day erase your dog life for tearing out my father’s beard.

After picking out two nice fatty dog’s legs, she cleaned and tossed them into a pot of soup stock, where they boiled noisily. She added spices to enhance the flavor of the meat, and tended to the fire herself, making it as strong as possible at first and then letting the meat stew over a low flame. People out on the street could smell it cooking, and big-eared Lü Seven, a regular customer, banged on the door when the aroma drifted his way. “Hey, Big-Footed Fairy,” he shouted, “what wind cleared the air this time? You’re cooking dog’s legs again, so put me down for one.”

“I’ll put you down for one of your damned mother’s legs!” she cursed loudly and banged the side of the pot with a spoon. In the space of a single night, she had recaptured Dog-Meat Xishi’s nature—easy to laugh and quick to curse—and had regained her looks. Where the enchanting gentility that had characterized the days of all encompassing yearning for Qian Ding had gone, no one knew, but it was gone. After polishing off a bowl of pig’s-blood gruel and a plate of chopped-up dog entrails, she brushed her teeth with salt, rinsed her mouth, combed her hair, and washed her face, then applied powder and dabbed on some rouge before changing out of her old clothes and taking a good look at herself in the mirror. She touched up her hair with wet fingers and placed a red velvet flower over one ear. Her eyes were moist and bright, her appearance one of grace and elegance. Even she was so taken by her own beauty that tender feelings made a reappearance. An assassin in the making? Hardly. More like a sexual provocateur. She nearly crumbled under the weight of her tender feelings, and hastily turned the mirror around so she could grind her teeth and let the hatred reignite inside her. In order to reinforce her confidence and keep her will from dissolving, she went inside to take another look at her father’s chin. The flour she’d spread on it had formed clumps and was giving off a sour, unpleasant odor that had drawn flies to it. Presenting an appearance that both nauseated and pained her, he awoke with a shout when she lightly poked his chin with a piece of kindling; obviously in pain, he gazed at her with a vacant look in his puffy eyes.

“I want to ask you, Dieh,” she said coldly. “What were you doing in town at that hour?”

“I went to a whorehouse,” he admitted frankly.

“Pfft!” she uttered in a mocking tone. “Maybe some whore picked your beard clean to make herself a flyswatter.”

“No, we’re all on good terms. They would never do that to me,” he insisted. “When I came out of the whorehouse, I was walking down the lane behind the county yamen when a masked man jumped out of the darkness, knocked me to the ground, and yanked out my beard, hair by hair!”

“One man could do all that?”

“He knew his martial arts. Besides, I was pretty drunk.”

“How do you know it was him?”

“He had a black bag hanging from his chin,” he said confidently. “Nobody but a man with a fine beard would take such care of it.”

“All right, then, I’ll avenge you,” she said. “You may be a scoundrel, but you are my dieh!”

“How do you plan to avenge me?”

“I’ll kill him!”

“No, you can’t do that. That is beyond your ability. If you can yank out a handful of his beard, that will be vengeance enough for me.”

“All right, that’s what I’ll do.”

“But that is impossible too,” he said, shaking his head. “With his powerful legs, he can jump three feet in the air, which is how I know he is a practiced fighter.”

“Don’t you know the adage ‘When virtue rises one foot, vice rises ten’?”

“I’ll wait here for good news,” he said sarcastically. “Except there is another adage that bothers me, and that is ‘Throw a meaty bun at a dog and it’ll never come back.’”

“You just wait.”

“Your dieh may be good for little, but I am still your dieh, and I’d rather you didn’t go. I’ve had a good long sleep, and that’s given me a chance to think some things through. Losing my beard like that is fit punishment for my misdeeds, and I cannot hold anyone else to blame. I’m going to head back, but no more singing opera for me. I’ve spent my whole life doing that, and it has turned me into an undesirable character. There is a line in opera that goes, ‘Cast off your old self and be a new man.’ Well, in my case let’s change it to ‘Lose your beard and be a new man.’”