Mo Yan - Pow!

The little boy handed the old man a shell that had been polished to a high gloss. I began to cry, and waves of heat washed over my heart. Bitter hatred and loving kindness sent hot blood racing through my veins, and only by firing the mortar could I release what bubbled inside me. So I dried my eyes and composed myself, then straddled the mortar and, instinctively estimating the distance, took aim at the western wing of Lao Lan's house, about five hundred yards ahead of us. Lao Lan and three township officials were playing mah-jongg on a Ming Dynasty table worth at least two hundred thousand RMB. One was a woman with a large, doughy face, thread-thin eyebrows and blood-red lips—an altogether disgusting sight. Let Lao Lan take her with him. Where? The Western Heaven! I took the shell from the old man, placed it into the tube and gently let go. The tube swallowed the shell, the shell slid into the tube. The first sound was soft, muted—the sound of the ignited shell touching the base of the tube. Then a detonation that nearly shattered my eardrums drove the weasels scurrying in fright. The shell tore like a siren across the sky, blazing a tail through the moonbeams, and then landed exactly where it wanted. First, a bright blue light, then a deafening POW!

Lao Lan emerged from the cloud of gunpowder smoke, shook off the dust and sneered. He'd survived unscathed.

I adjusted the tube until it was aimed at Yao Qi's living room, where he and Lao Lan were sitting on a leather sofa, engaged in a whispered conversation about something shameful. Good—Yao Qi, you and Lao Lan can go meet the King of the Underworld together. I took a shell from the old man and let go. It screamed out of the tube, flew across the sky, tore through the moonbeams and then hit the roof of its target with a POW! Shrapnel flew in all directions, some into the walls and some up into the ceiling. One pea-sized sliver hit Yao Qi in the gums and he screamed in pain.

‘You'll never get me with one of those,’ sneered Lao Lan.

I took aim at Fan Zhaoxia's beauty salon and accepted another shell from the old man. That the first two had missed their target was a bit disheartening but I had thirty-nine to go. Sooner or later one of them would rip him to pieces. I dropped the shell down the tube. It flew out like an imp with a song on its lips. Lao Lan was sitting back in the barber's chair, his eyes closed, and Fan Zhaoxia was giving him a shave. His skin was so smooth you could wipe it with a silk rag and not produce a sound. But Fan kept shaving. Shaving. People talk about the pleasure of a good shave. This was obviously a very good shave, for Lao Lan was snoring. Over the years, he'd got into the habit of napping in the barber's chair. He suffered from insomnia; and when he did finally sleep he was visited by dreams that kept him from a deep sleep; the buzz of a mosquito was all it took to startle him awake. Sleep never comes easily to people with a guilty conscience—it's a sort of divine retribution. The mortar shell tore through the shop's ceiling and landed giddily on the terrazzo floor in the middle of a pile of prickly hair before disintegrating with an angry POW! A piece the size of a horse's tooth struck the mirror in front of the barber's chair; another, the size of a soybean, hit Fan Zhaoxia in the wrist. She dropped her razor and fell to her knees with a cry of alarm. The razor lay, cracked, beside her.

Lao Lan's eyes snapped open. ‘Don't be afraid,’ he consoled her, ‘it's only Luo Xiaotong up to his old tricks.’

The fourth shell was aimed at Huachang's banquet room, a place with which I was very familiar. Lao Lan was hosting a banquet for every villager over the age of eighty. It was a generous act and possessed of immense publicity potential. The three reporters I'd met were busy with their cameras, filming the five old men and three old women. In the middle of the table sat an enormous cake with a line of red candles. A young woman lit them with a lighter and asked one of the old women to blow them out. Possessed of only two teeth, she tried her best to do so as the air whistled through the gaps in her gums. I held onto the fourth shell a bit longer, worried about hurting the old villagers, but this was no time to stop. I said a silent prayer for them and spoke to the shell, asking it to hit Lao Lan on the head! To kill him and no one else. The shell screamed out of the tube, streaked across the river, hovered briefly above the banquet room and then plummeted. You can probably guess what happened next, right? Right. It landed smack in the middle of the cake. Most of the candles were extinguished, all but two. Rich, buttery frosting flew into the old people's faces and covered the lenses of the cameras.

The fifth shell I aimed at the meat-cleansing workshop, the site of my greatest pride and deepest sorrow. The night shift was injecting water into some camels, each with a hose up its nose, making them look as strange as a clutch of witches. Lao Lan was giving the man who had usurped my position—Wan Xiaojiang—instructions; he was loud but not loud enough for me to hear what he was saying. The screech of the departing shell drowned out his words. Wan Xiaojiang, you little bastard, it was because of you that my sister and I had to leave our village. If anything, I hate you more than I hate Lao Lan, and if Heaven has eyes, then this shell has your name on it. I waited till I had calmed down a bit, then took several deep breaths and let the shell slip gently down the tube. It slipped out like a fat little boy who'd grown wings, flew towards its designated target, burst through the ceiling, landed in front of Wan Xiaojiang, smashed his right foot and then —POW! His bulging belly was carried away in the explosion but the rest of him was intact, like the quasi-magical handiwork of a master butcher.

Lao Lan was blown away by the blast and I blanked out. When I came to, the wretch had crawled out of the fouled water he'd landed in. Except for a muddy bottom, he was unmarked.

The desk of Township Head Hou was the target of the sixth shell. An envelope stuffed with RMB was shredded. It had been lying atop a sheet of reinforced glass under which the township head had placed photographs of him and several seductive transvestites—memories of his Thailand vacation. The glass was so hard it should have caused an explosion but didn't. Which meant that that particular shell was a peace projectile. What, you wonder, is that? I'll tell you. Some of the men who worked on this ammunition were anti-war. When their supervisors were not looking, they pissed into the shells. Though they gleamed on the outside, the powder inside was hopelessly wet, turning them mute on the day they left the armoury. There were many varieties of peace projectiles; this was but one. Another variety was stuffed with a dove instead of explosives, while yet another was filled with paper on which was written: Long live friendship between the peoples of China and Japan. This particular one was flattened like a pancake; the reinforced glass was shattered and the photographs of the township head were sucked into the flattened shell, as clear as ever, except in reverse.

Firing the seventh shell was agonizing for me because Lao Lan was standing in front of my mother's grave. I couldn't see his face in the moonlight, only the back of his head, like a glossy watermelon, and the long shadow he cast. The words on the headstone I'd personally placed at her tomb recognized me, and her image floated up in front of my eyes, as if she were standing in front of me, blocking my mortar with her body. ‘Move away, Mother,’ I said. She wouldn't. Her silent miserable stare felt like a dull knife sawing away on my heart. The old man, who was right beside me, said, ‘Go ahead, fire!’ Sure, why not? Mother was dead, after all, and the dead have nothing to fear from a mortar shell. I shut my eyes and dropped the shell into the tube. POW! It passed through her image and flew off weeping. When it landed, it blew her tomb into pieces so small they could be used as road paving.