Mo Yan: Radish

‘Hei-hai!’

‘Hei-hai!’

He snapped out of his reverie and opened his eyes. The fish vanished. The hammer slipped out of his hands and dropped into the green water below the gate, spraying a watery chrysanthemum into the air.

‘That little monkey’s not all there,’ Director Liu said as he climbed onto the gate and grabbed the boy by the ear. ‘Go on, go break rocks with the women and see if you can find a mother who’ll take you in.’

The mason also came up onto the gate and rubbed the boy’s cold scalp. ‘Go on,’ he said, ‘go find your hammer. Break as much rock as you can. Then you can go play.’

‘If I catch you loafing on the job, I’ll cut your ear off as a snack to go with my drink,’ Director Liu thundered.

Hei-hai trembled. He slipped through the handrail, grabbed the base of a pillar with both hands and hung there.

‘You’ll kill yourself doing that!’ the mason shouted in alarm as he reached down to grab the boy’s hand. But Hei-hai pulled away, clung to a bulge in one of the bridge pylons and slid down nimbly. Pressing up against the stone like a wall lizard, he let himself down into the trough, scooped up his hammer, climbed out and disappeared under a bridge opening.

‘That damned little monkey!’ Director Liu said, stroking his chin. ‘He’s just a goddamned little monkey!’

Hei-hai emerged from under the bridge and timidly made his way to the women, who were talking and laughing. The young women blushed red as coxcombs, wanting to listen to the dirty talk, but afraid to hear it. When the boy appeared darkly in their midst, the women’s mouths clamped shut. A moment later, there was a bit of whispering, and when they saw that he did not react, their voices grew louder.

‘Would you look at that sorry little kid! They let him go half naked in this weather!’

‘You can’t love a kid that doesn’t come out of you.’

‘I hear she does you-know-what at home…’

Hei-hai turned away from the women and gazed at the river. The surface was red in places, green in others. Willow trees on the southern bank fluttered like dragonflies.

A young woman in a crimson bandana walked up behind Hei-hai and said softly, ‘Where’s your village, boy?’

He cocked his head and glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. He spotted a fine dusting of yellow fuzz on her upper lip. She had big eyes, but dense, fuzzy lashes gave her a sleepy look.

‘What’s your name, boy?’

Hei-hai was fighting with the star thistles in the sand, pinching off six-and eight-thorned thistles with his toes. Then he stepped on them, snapping off all the thorns and crushing them with feet as hard as a mule’s hooves.

She laughed gaily. ‘That’s quite a talent, dark little boy. You have feet like horseshoes. Why don’t you say something?’ She poked him on the shoulder with two fingers. ‘Didn’t you hear me? I asked you a question.’

Hei-hai felt the two warm fingers trail down from his shoulder and stop at one of the scars on his back.

‘Oh my, where did you get these?’

His ears twitched. That caught her attention, such incredibly long ears.

‘So, you can wiggle your ears,’ she said. ‘Just like a bunny rabbit.’

Now the hand had moved up to Hei-hai’s ear, and he felt the two fingers pinch his delicate lobe.

‘Tell me about these scars.’ She gently tugged his ear until he was facing her, level with her chest. Rather than look up, he stared straight ahead, at red-checked fabric across which lay the tip of a yellowed braid. ‘Dog bites? Boils? Climbing trees? You poor thing.’

Moved, he gazed up at her smooth, round chin. He sniffled.

‘Looking to adopt, Juzi?’ a large, round-faced woman shouted.

Hei-hai’s eyes rolled in their sockets, the whites fluttered like moths.

‘That’s right, my name’s Juzi,’ she told him. ‘I’m from a village up ahead about ten li . If you feel like talking, just call me “big sister Juzi”.’

‘Looking for a husband, Juzi? Have you found the one you want? How many years will you have to hold out till this duckling is ready to mount?’

‘Stinking old crone!’ Juzi cursed the fat woman. ‘Nothing but shit comes out of that mouth.’ She led Hei-hai over to the mountain of broken rock and dug around to find one with a flat surface. ‘Sit on this,’ she said, ‘and stay close to me. Start breaking rocks, but take it easy.’ She found a smooth rock for herself and placed it near his. In a matter of moments, the sandy area in front of the floodgate was ringing with the sound of metal on stone. With Hei-hai as their topic, the women exchanged views on a hard life and the reasons behind it. In this ‘women’s philosophy’ eternal truths were mixed with plenty of nonsense. Juzi paid no attention to it — she was focused on the boy. At first he acknowledged her attention with an occasional glance, but before long he looked to be in a trance, eyes wide, gazing into space, while she looked on anxiously. He grasped a rock with his left hand and raised the hammer with his right. The effort seemed to exhaust him, and the hammer dropped like a heavy object in free fall. She nearly cried out every time she saw the hammer descending toward his hand, but nothing happened — the hammer traced a wobbly arc in the air, but always landed on the rock.

Hei-hai’s eyes were fixed on the rocks at first, but a strange sound drifted over from the river, thin and faint, like nibbling fishes, now near, now far. Straining to capture it with both eyes and ears, he saw a bright gassy cloud rising over the river, which seemed to capture the oscillating hum within. His cheeks grew ruddy and an affecting smile gathered at the corners of his mouth. He had long forgotten where he was sitting and what he was doing, as if the arm that moved up and down belonged to someone else. Then the index finger of his left hand went numb, and the arm jerked. A sound emerged from his mouth, something between a moan and a sigh. He looked down and saw that the nail on that finger was cracked in several places, and that blood was oozing from the cracks.

‘Have you smashed your finger?’ the woman asked as she jumped up and stepped over to crouch by him. ‘Oh no, look what you’ve done! Who works like that, letting his thoughts fly off to who knows where?’

Hei-hai scooped up a handful of dirt while she was scolding him and pressed it on the injured finger.

‘Have you lost your mind, Hei-hai?’ She dragged him down to the river. ‘There’s filthy stuff in that dirt.’ The soles of his feet slapped loudly on the gleaming banks. He crouched down at the river’s edge, where the woman stuck his finger into the water. A trickle of dirty yellow formed in front of his finger. Once the dirt had washed away, red threads of blood quivered in the water. The boy’s fingernail looked like cracked jade.

‘Does it hurt?’

He didn’t make a sound. His eyes were fixed on river shrimp at the bottom. The transparent crustaceans’ feelers fluttered slowly, exquisitely.

She took out a handkerchief embroidered with a China rose and wrapped it around the finger, then led him back to the rock pile. ‘Sit here and relax,’ she said. ‘No one will bother you, you poor little devil.’

The other women stopped what they were doing to cast misty looks their way. Silence lay over the rock pile. Patches of cloud floated through the bright blue sky like lambs, casting fleeting shadows that enshrouded the pale riverbank and the stoic water. The women’s faces wore dreary looks, like barren soil in which nothing grew. After a long moment of indecision they went back to work, as if waking from a dream, the monotonous sound of metal on stone creating an aura of resignation.

Hei-hai sat silently, staring at the red flower embroidered on the handkerchief. Another red flower adorned the edge, this one created by blood from under his fingernail. The women quickly put him out of their minds and went back to laughing and talking. Hei-hai brought his injured finger to his mouth and untied the knot in the handkerchief with his teeth, then packed the finger in another handful of dirt. Juzi was about to say something, but stopped when she saw him retie the handkerchief around the finger using his teeth and free hand. She sighed, raised her hammer and brought it down hard on a dark red rock. Its knife-like edges emitted enormous sparks when they came in contact with the hammer, visible even in the bright sunlight.