Mo Yan - Sandalwood Death

General Yue, at the head of his army, passed through the northern gate, followed by a contingent of thrill-seeking children. Armed with tree branches, dry sorghum stalks, and sunflower stems, they had painted their faces with ashes or red coloring. Taking their cue from the adults, they raised shouts in immature voices and swaggered in high spirits as they marched along. Old folks had taken positions on the wall to burn incense and pray for a battlefield victory.

General Yue picked up the pace when they reached the outskirts of town. Ai Hu’s urgent gong beats increased the speed of marching. The railroad shed was not far from town; in fact, it was visible as soon as the army passed through the gate. A light drizzle created patches of mist over the fields. Winter wheat had already turned green; the smell of mud was in the air. Flowers on the sowthistle facing the sun in ditches and furrows looked like specks of gold. Roadside wild apricots were in full bloom, turning the trees a snowy white. A pair of turtledoves, startled by the marching column, flew out of the underbrush; cuckoos made a racket in a distant grove.

The Qingdao-to-Gaomi portion of the Jiaozhou-Jinan line was basically completed; the tracks lay cold and detached in the open field, like a dragon whose head was visible but whose tail extended out of view. Men were already out working on the tracks, pounding spikes into the ground and creating a symphony of metallic rhythms. Milky white smoke streamed into the sky from the railroad shed, and even at that distance—several li—General Yue detected the aroma of meat cooking.

When he was about one li from the railroad shed, General Yue turned to look at his troops. A disciplined army when it set out from town had devolved into a ragtag assemblage of men with mud-caked shoes, stomping along like wayward bears. The General had Sun Wukong and Zhu Bajie slow down and told Ai Hu to stop beating the gong. Once the main body of troops had caught up, he issued his orders:

“Clean the mud from your feet, my sons, and get ready to attack!”

They did as he commanded, but gobs of mud wound up in other men’s faces, which led to unpleasant grumblings. Some of the men shook their feet so hard that their shoes flew off with the mud. Seeing that the time was ripe, General Yue announced loudly:

“Iron head, iron waist, iron stockade, impervious to bullets. Valiant warriors, charge the enemy, tear up the tracks, kill the foreign soldiers, and bring peace for generations to come!”

After exhorting his troops, General Yue raised his club and, with a war whoop, bravely led the charge, with Sun Wukong and Zhu Bajie right behind him, holding high the war flags. Ai Hu fell face first into the mud and lost his shoes to the gooey mess. But he scrambled to his feet and took off running barefoot. Shouts emerged from the throats of the rest of the army as they launched their attack on the railroad shed like a swarm of bees.

The men working on the tracks thought it was an opera troupe heading their way, not realizing that the masses were rebelling until the invaders were nearly upon them. They threw down their tools and fled for their lives.

Guarding the work under way was a squad of German marines, a mere dozen men. The earsplitting shouts interrupted their breakfast, and bad news greeted the squad leader when he stepped outside to see what was happening. He rushed back inside and ordered his men to grab their rifles. By the time General Yue and his men were ten or fifteen meters from the shed, the armed Germans were already outside with their rifles.

General Yue saw puffs of white smoke emerge from several of the German rifles and heard the crack of gunfire. Someone screamed behind him, but he had the time neither to turn back to look nor to think. He envisioned himself as a piece of driftwood propelled by surging waves as he virtually flew into the German devils’ shed, in the center of which stood a large table with a pot of stewed pork and some shiny silverware. The meaty smell filled his nostrils. The top half of a German marine had made it under the table; his long legs had not. Zhu Bajie’s rake quickly made its mark on the man’s legs, producing a long and loud shriek. The words sounded like gibberish, but the meaning was clear—he was crying out for his mother and father. General Yue ran out of the shed to lead the pursuit of the fleeing German marines. Most were headed for the sub-grade of the tracks, trying to escape the mob of shouting men behind them.

One of the marines was running in the opposite direction. General Yue and Ai Hu went after him. The man did not seem to be running all-out, and the distance between them shrank rapidly. General Yue watched in fascination as the man stumbled along stiff-legged, as if he had sticks for legs. It was almost comical. Then, without warning, the German dove into a ditch, out of which a puff of green smoke rose almost immediately. An instant later, Ai Hu, who was running ahead of the General, jerked upward before tumbling headlong to the ground. At first he thought the youngster had gotten his legs tangled up, but only until he saw fresh blood seeping from a hole in his forehead. Ai Hu, he knew for certain, had been hit by a bullet from the German’s gun, and he was grief-stricken. He charged the enemy marine, swinging his club over his head, and was nearly brought down by a bullet that whizzed past his ear. But in no time he was upon the German, who came out to meet him, a bayonet attached to his rifle. One swing of his club knocked the rifle out of the man’s hands; with a fearful shout, he turned and ran down the ditch, with General Yue hot on his heels. The German’s high-topped boots slurped in the mud with every step, as if he were dragging mud buckets behind him. General Yue swung his club again, this time connecting with the nape of the man’s neck. A strange bleat burst from the man’s lips, whose body released a muttony odor, and the General’s immediate thought was that the man’s mother might have been a ewe.

The German tripped and fell, burying his face in the mud, and he no sooner realized what had happened than General Yue’s club had flattened his tall helmet. The General was about to keep clubbing him when he saw that the man’s blue eyes were like those of the lamb they’d sacrificed earlier—sad eyes, blinking pitifully, and the General’s wrist failed him. This time the club hit the German marine not on the head but on the shoulder.

Razor-tipped knife in hand, Zhao Jia stood in the center of the parade ground, a bowlegged young apprentice at his side, facing a tall pine post to which the failed assassin of Yuan Shikai was bound, awaiting execution by the slicing death of five hundred cuts. Arrayed behind him were dozens of high-ranking officers of the New Army, seated on fine horses, while behind the execution post, five thousand foot soldiers stood in tight formation, looking from a distance like a forest, and up close like marionettes. Dry early winter winds swept powdery alkaline dirt into the soldiers’ faces. All those gazes made Zhao Jia, who had carried out hundreds of executions, slightly nervous, and somewhat self-conscious. By force of will he suppressed these feelings, which could only have a negative impact on his work, and focused on the condemned man before him, refusing to look at either the mounted officers or the formation of soldiers.

Something his shifu, Grandma Yu, had told him was on his mind: A model executioner does not see a living being as he prepares to carry out his task. Before him is nothing but strips of muscle and flesh, discrete internal organs, and a skeleton. After forty years in the trade, Zhao Jia had attained that degree of perfection. But for some reason, on this day he was on edge. After plying his trade for decades, during which he had ended the lives of nearly a thousand people, before him now was the finest specimen of the male body he had ever seen: a proud nose and capacious mouth, slanting eyebrows and starry eyes, his naked body a scene of perfection, with chiseled chest muscles and a flat, taut abdomen, all covered with glossy bronze skin. What truly caught his attention, however, was the ubiquitous taunting smile on the face of the young man, who was returning Zhao Jia’s scrutiny. A sense of shame engulfed Zhao in much the same way that a misbehaving child cannot bear to look his father in the eye.