Mo Yan - Sandalwood Death

Dejection settled over the room, punctuated by long sighs. County Scholar Qu, he with the facial blemish, said:

“Well, then, did the German Kaiser send his envoy to pay restitution for the destruction of our burial grounds?”

“Scholar Qu has finally touched upon something,” Second Master said animatedly. “When the special envoy was led into the Old Buddha’s presence, he prostrated himself three times and kowtowed nine before handing up an account book printed on vellum that could last millennia. ‘The Great Kaiser,’ the envoy said, ‘will under no circumstances do anything to bring harm to the people of Northeast Gaomi Township. We will pay a hundred ounces of silver for every acre of land utilized and two hundred for every gravesite disturbed. A steamship with a load of silver ingots has already been dispatched.’”

The news was met with a moment of stunned silence, then greeted with an uproar.

“Damned liar! They took an acre and a quarter of my land, and gave me eight ounces.”

“They destroyed two of my ancestors’ gravesites, and gave me twelve.”

“Silver? Where is it? I don’t see any silver.”

“What are you all bawling about?” Second Master demanded unhappily as he banged his fist on the table. “All your complaints don’t make a damned bit of difference! Silver? I’ll tell you where it went. It was skimmed away by those crooked interpreters, traitors, and compradors, that’s where!”

“He’s right,” Young Master Wu agreed. “You all know Xiaoqiu, who sells oil fritters in Front Village, don’t you? Well, he worked as an attendant for a man who interpreted for a German engineer for three months, and wound up with half a sack of silver dollars that he picked up off the floor during their nightly card games. As long as you’re involved with the railroad—you can be a bloody tortoise or a bastard turtle—you’ll strike it rich. Let me put it differently: ‘When the train whistle blows, gold in thousands flows.’ ”

“Second Master,” Scholar Qu said tentatively, “does the Old Buddha know any of this?”

“Why ask me?” He wore a scowl. “I’ll just have to go ask someone else.”

His comment was met with forced smiles all around, before the men returned to their tea, slurping loudly.

An awkward silence settled over the room. Second Master cast a furtive look out the door to make sure that no one was outside listening.

“And that’s not the worst of it,” he said softly. “Interested in hearing more?”

Every eye turned to Second Master’s mouth, waiting expectantly.

After looking around the room, he said with a sense of heightened mystery:

“A good friend of the family, Wang Peiran, works as an assistant to one of the Jiaozhou yamen officials. He tells me that many strange incidents have occurred over the past few days, including men who have woken up in the morning to find that their queues have been cut off!”

Looks of incomprehension decorated all the faces around him. No one dared utter a word. Ears pricked, they waited for him to continue.

“The immediate effect has been light-headedness and a general weakness that spreads to their limbs. They then fall into a trance that nearly destroys their ability to speak. They have become blithering idiots, impervious to medical intervention, because they do not suffer from a physical malady.”

“I hope this won’t usher in a second Taiping Rebellion,” Young Master Wu said. “I’ve heard old people recall the time in the Xianfeng reign when the Taipings came north, how they first cut off queues, and then heads.”

“No, nothing like that,” Second Master said. “This time it’s German missionaries casting their secret spells, or so I heard.”

Scholar Qu had his doubts.

“What could they expect to accomplish by cutting off queues?” he asked.

“Don’t be such a naïve pedant,” Second Master replied, clearly annoyed. “Do you really think that’s what they are after, a bunch of queues? What they want is our souls! Why else would those particular symptoms appear in men who lost their queues? It’s a clear sign of losing their souls.”

“I still don’t quite understand, Second Master,” Scholar Qu said. “What good can it do the Germans to take all those souls?”

Second Master smirked in response.

“I think I know the answer,” Young Master Wu said. “It’s tied to the construction of the railway, isn’t it?”

“Our young Wu is nobody’s fool,” Second Master said. Then he lowered his voice and added in a mysterious tone, “What I am going to tell you now must remain here with us. The Germans bury men’s queues beneath the railroad tracks, one for each railroad tie. Every one of those queues represents a soul, and each soul represents a hale and hearty man. Here is something to think about: The trains are manufactured out of pig iron and weigh a ton. They neither drink nor eat, so how can they move across the land? And not just move, but move at an unthinkably high speed. What powers them? Think that over.”

The mind-numbing thought produced an eerie silence. The whistle of a teakettle out back pierced the men’s eardrums. Disaster loomed; they all felt it. Chills ran down their necks, touched, it seemed, by an invisible pair of scissors.

As anxiety over the safety of their queues gripped the men, the young clerk from the town dispensary, Qiusheng, scurried into the teashop as if flames were nipping at his heels.

“Proprietor Sun,” he said breathlessly, “bad news… my shopkeeper sent me to tell you… German engineers… making improper advances to your wife… shopkeeper says you have to hurry or something terrible could happen…”

The news stunned Sun Bing, who dropped the teakettle in his hand and sprayed hot water and steam all around him. But shock quickly turned to anger and a pulsing of hot blood through his veins. The patrons looked on as his scarred chin began to twitch and the peaceful, benign look on his face took wing and flew away, supplanted by a fiendish grimace. Using his right hand for leverage, he leaped over the counter and grabbed the date-wood club resting against the door before running out into the street.

The excited teashop customers were all abuzz; still reeling from the frightful news about pigtails, they had now been given a second dose of bad news, with Germans taking advantage of a Chinese woman, effectively transforming terror into anger. A storehouse of resentment had been building among local residents ever since the Germans had begun construction of the Jiaozhou-Jinan line, resentment that had spilled over into loathing. Courage that had long been hidden within the residents of Northeast Gaomi Township burst to the surface, and a sense of righteous indignation took hold in people’s hearts, erasing all concerns over their own physical safety. Sun Bing’s patrons fell in behind him, shouting loudly on the road to the marketplace.

The wind whistled past Sun Bing’s ears as he ran down the narrow street, the blood in his veins surging to his head, causing his eardrums to throb and hum and his eyes to glaze over. People along the way might as well have been made of paper the way they rocked back and forth as bursts of air emanating from his frantic passage hit them in waves. Distorted faces brushed past his shoulders. He saw a tight circle of people in the square in front of the Jishengtang Pharmacy and the Li Jin General Store. He could not see what they were looking at, but he heard his wife’s screams and curses and the bawling of his twins, Bao’er and Yun’er, coming from inside the circle. He roared like a lion, raised his club over his head, and leaped into the fray, the crowd parting to make room. What he saw was a pair of long-legged German engineers, their heads looking like wooden clappers, one in front and one in back, with their hands all over his wife. She was fighting off their grasp, but could not keep their hands away from top and bottom at the same time. The Germans’ soft pink hands, covered with fine hair, were all over her, like octopus tentacles; their green eyes seemed lit up with will-o’-the-wisps. Several Chinese lackeys stood off to the side clapping and shouting encouragement. Sun’s twins were rolling and crawling on the ground and sending up a heart-rending howl. Roaring like a wounded animal, Sun charged the man who was bent over fondling his wife’s crotch with both hands, his back to Sun, and brought the club—so heavy it felt like iron or steel—down on the back of his head, as if carried by a dark red burst of wind. A sickening crunch announced the meeting of the silver-gray, glossy, elongated head and the date-wood club, which vibrated in his hands. The German’s body jerked upward in a strange arc before going limp; his hands were still inside Little Peach’s pants as he fell over, taking her with him, and pinning her to the ground. Sun Bing saw a rivulet of blood flowing from the engineer’s head a brief moment before he smelled it. The next thing he saw was the almost demonic look on the face of the other German, who had been fondling his wife’s breasts, no longer the silly grin that had borne witness to the fun he was having. Sun tried to raise his club a second time to repeat the scene on the foreign devil who was fondling his wife, but his arms suddenly seemed paralyzed, and the club fell harmlessly to the ground. The fatal blow had used up all his strength. Yet out of the corner of his eye, he saw aligned behind him a small forest of raised weapons: carrying poles, hoes, shovels, brooms, but mainly fists. A deafening battle cry pounded his eardrums. Railway workers and the Chinese lackeys who had been looking on grabbed hold of the terrified engineer and carried him out of the way, stumbling past the angry mob and leaving the clubbed German at the mercy of the crowd.