Mo Yan - Sandalwood Death

She took two steps backward, cinched the sash around her waist, adjusted her clothes, limbered her joints, and then, after taking a deep breath, leaped into the air and grabbed hold of the limb with both hands. It bent from the weight, so frightening a perched owl that it shrieked, spread its wings, and glided silently into the yamen. Owls were among the Magistrate’s favorite birds. Ten or more of them often perched on a large scholar tree in the grain-storage compound, and he was given to referring to them as its guardian spirits, the bane of rodents. He would sometimes walk by, stroking his beard and intoning: “Rodents in the storehouse, big as a large jar; if someone comes in, they stay where they are…” Dearest Magistrate, you of great learning, filled with classical wisdom, my lover. She pulled herself up until she was sitting on the limb.

The third watch had just been sounded, the sole interruption of silence in the yamen. From her perch she saw the silvery glass ball atop the pavilion in the center of the flower garden and the shiny ripples on the little pond beside it. Patches of light emerged from the Western Parlor, apparently the Magistrate’s sickroom. My dear Magistrate, I know you are craning your neck, hoping to see me; your mind must be as unsettled as boiling water. Do not be worried, my dear, for your Meiniang, daughter of the Sun family, is about to leap over this wall. I am determined to see you, even if your wife is sitting at your side, like a lioness keeping watch over her kill, even if she lashes me across the back!

After edging her way along the limb, she jumped down onto the wall, but what happened next was something she would not forget as long as she lived. Her foot slipped when it landed on the wall, and she came crashing down on the other side, decapitating stalks of green bamboo, with the accompanying noise. Her backside ached, her arms suffered painful scrapes, and her insides were badly jumbled. With difficulty she managed to stand by holding on to a bamboo stalk, and, overcome by resentment over having to go through this to see him, she focused on the lamplight emerging from the Western Parlor. She reached down to rub her backside and felt something sticky. What is that? Her first thought was that she was bleeding from the fall, but when she brought her hand up to her nose, the foul-smelling, sticky dark substance could only be dog filth. My god, what black-hearted, unscrupulous wretch thought up this sinister plan to turn Sun Meiniang into such a sorry figure? Does this mean I am reduced to seeing Magistrate Qian with dog filth on my behind? Could I even want to see him after the way he has disgraced and humiliated me? Utterly dispirited, she felt rage build up inside her alongside feelings of low self-esteem. Go on, Qian Ding, be sick and die, and leave your respectable wife to her widowhood. If she chooses not to remain a widow, she can take poison or hang herself in defense of her wifely virtue and become a martyr; the citizens of Gaomi will then contribute to the purchase of a commemorative stone arch dedicated to her chastity.

She walked up to the elm tree, wrapped her arms around the trunk, and started to climb. Where the nimble, springy, squirrel-like energy of only a few moments before had gone, she could not explain, but she barely made it halfway up before she slid back down, once, twice, several times, until her arms and legs were coated with a dark, smelly substance—more dog filth, which had been smeared all over the tree trunk. Meiniang wiped her hands on the ground, tears of indignation slipping from her eyes, when she heard the sound of mocking laughter from behind the rockery. Then two black-clad, veiled figures emerged, preceded by a lantern that cast a muted red glow, reminiscent of the lantern the legendary Fox Fairy used to lead people to safety. The two figures, who could have been men and could have been women, gave no signs of their true appearance.

Terror-stricken, Sun Meiniang raised her hands to cover her face, but stopped when she recalled that they were smeared with dog droppings. So she lowered her head and instinctively shrank back all the way to the base of the wall. The taller of the two figures held the lantern up close to Meiniang’s face, as if to illuminate it for the benefit of the shorter person, who raised a thin stick used to frighten snakes hidden in the grass, stuck it under Meiniang’s chin, and lifted up her face. Utterly mortified and ashamed, she was powerless to resist. So she squeezed her eyes shut and let the tears run freely down her cheeks. She heard the person holding the stick heave a long sigh, and could tell that it was a woman’s voice. It was only a guess, but she assumed that it must be Magistrate Qian’s wife, and in that split second, the anguish she had felt turned to defiance; she was energized. Holding her head high, she smiled and searched for the words that would inflict the most pain on her foe. Her initial instinct was to ask the First Lady if she was covering her face with a black veil to hide her pockmarks. But before she could get the words out, the person stepped up, thrust her hand down inside Meiniang’s collar, and yanked away a bright, shiny object. It was the jade Buddha the Magistrate had given her in exchange for the jadeite thumb guard, not exactly a pledge of love, more a protective amulet. She sprang frantically forward to retrieve the object, but a kick behind her knee from the taller person sent her down on all fours. She saw the First Lady’s black veil flutter and her body shift slightly. It’s too late to worry about saving face, since I am already soiled by dog filth, she was thinking, so now I need to find the most hurtful words possible as payback for how she has violated me. “I know who you are,” she said, “and I know all about your pockmarks. The love of my life tells me you have a terrible body odor, that your mouth smells like maggots, and that he hasn’t slept with you for three years. If I were you, I’d hang myself out of humiliation. Any woman who outlives a man’s desire is no different than a coffin anyway.”

Meiniang’s gratifying outburst was interrupted by a stern retort from the short black-clad individual: “You little slut, how dare you come whoring around the yamen. Beat her, give her fifty lashes, then kick her out through the dog door!”

The taller person took a whip out from under his black clothes, kicked Meiniang to the ground, and, before she could utter another curse, laid the whip across her buttocks. She shrieked in pain just before the second lash connected with her buttocks; she looked up in time to see the other figure, the Magistrate’s stinking wife, turn and wobble off. The third lash landed as hard as the first two, but the next one did not hurt as much, and those that followed got lighter and lighter, until the person was hitting the wall, not her. Meiniang knew that her assailant was a decent person at heart, although her exaggerated screams continued for their dramatic effect, to their mutual benefit. When he was done, the man dragged her over to the side gate of the Western Parlor, opened it, and shoved her outside, where she lay in a heap on the cobblestone lane east of the yamen.

Sun Meiniang lay on the kang, gnashing her teeth one minute and heartbroken the next. She gnashed her teeth out of hatred toward that savage, cold-hearted woman, while she was heartbroken that the Magistrate was confined to a sickbed, and cursed herself for a lack of willpower; even when she bit her own arm till it bled, she could not drive the image of the wonderful Qian Ding out of her mind. Chunsheng came to see her when her torment had reached a fever pitch, just the familiar face she needed to see. She grabbed him by the arms and said tearfully:

“Chunsheng, dear Chunsheng, tell me, how is Laoye?”