The caterpillar tracks under the tanks sped along, one link following the other, carrying the tank ahead with a loud rumble. Ruts and humps didn’t faze them; their trunks kept pointing forward. They raced along, wheezing, sneezing, spitting, a column of outrageous tyrants. Tiring of spitting their phlegm, they began spitting fireballs, the trunks recoiling with each burst. All they had to do was spin back and forth a time or two to flatten out a ditch, sometimes burying khaki-colored little men in the process. Everywhere they passed was now a mass of newly plowed soil. They rolled up to the sandy ridge, where bullets rained down on them – pow pow. They just bounced off. But not off the soldiers behind them, who crumpled in droves. A platoon of men ran out from behind the sandy ridge with sorghum-stalk torches, which they flung beneath the tanks. Explosions sent some of the tanks leaping off the ground and men rolling on the ground in front of them. A few of the tanks died, others were wounded. More men on the sandy ridge reacted like rubber balls, rolling down the sides to do battle with the helmeted soldiers. Jumbled shouts, incoherent screams. Flying fists, well-aimed kicks, choke holds, squeezed groins, bitten fingers, grabbed ears, gouged eyes. Silvery swords went in, red swords emerged. No form of battle went untried. A little soldier was losing to a bigger one, so he picked up a handful of sand and said, “Elder brother, you and I are distant cousins. The wife of a cousin on my father’s side is your kid sister. So please don’t use that rifle butt on me, okay?” “All right,” the bigger soldier said, “I’ll spare you this time, since I’ve sat in your house and enjoyed a few drinks. That wine decanter at your place is finely crafted. Those things are called Mandarin Duck decanters.” Without warning, the little soldier flung his sand into the bigger soldier’s face, blinding him temporarily. He then ran around behind the man and cracked his head open with a hand grenade.
There was so much happening that day that I’d have had to grow ten pairs of eyes to see it all and ten mouths to tell it. Helmeted soldiers charged in waves, the dead piling up like a wall; and still they couldn’t break through. Then they brought over flamethrowers that spurted death and crystallized the sand on the ridge. And more airships came, dropping great flatcakes and meat-filled buns, as well as bundles of colorful paper money. Exhausted by nightfall, both sides stopped to rest, but only for a short while, before the battle recommenced, so heated that sky and earth turned red, the frozen ground softened, and wild rabbits died in droves, their lives ending not by weapons but from fright.
The rifle fire and artillery barrages were unending; flares lit up the sky so brilliantly we could barely open our eyes.
As dawn broke, the helmeted soldiers threw up their arms in surrender.
On the first morning of 1948, the five members of our family, plus my goat, cautiously crossed the frozen Flood Dragon River and crawled up the opposite bank. Sha Zaohua and I helped First Sister drag the cart to the top, where we stood and gazed out at the patches of shattered ice, where artillery shells had landed, and at the water gushing out of the holes; as we listened to the crisp sound of ice cracking, we were thankful that none of us had fallen in. Sunlight fell on the battleground north of the river, where the smell of gunpowder lingered on; shouts, whoops of delight, and an occasional burst of gunfire kept the place alive. Fallen helmets looked like toadstools, and I was reminded of Big and Little Mute, whom Mother had placed in a bomb crater, where they lay uncovered, even by dirt. I told myself to turn and look toward our village, which had somehow avoided being reduced to rubble – a true miracle. The church was still standing, as was the mill house. Half of the tiled buildings in the Sima compound had been leveled, but our buildings were still standing, marred only by a hole from one of the artillery shells in the roof of the main house. We exchanged glances as we walked into the yard, as if we were all strangers. But then there were hugs all around, before we broke down and cried, Mother leading the way.
The sound of our crying was abruptly drowned out by the precious weeping of Sima Liang. We looked up and spotted him crouching in an apricot tree, looking like a wild animal. A dog pelt was draped over his shoulders. When Mother reached out to him, he leaped out of the tree like a puff of smoke and threw himself into her arms.
Chapter Five
1
The first snowfall of the era of peace blanketed the corpses, while hungry wild pigeons hobbled about on the snow, their unhappy cries sounding like the ambiguous sobs of widows. The next morning, the sky took on the appearance of translucent ice, and when the sun rose red in the eastern sky, the space between heaven and earth looked like a vast expanse of colored glaze. A carpet of white covered the land, and when the people emerged from their houses, their breath a steamy pink, they tramped through the virgin snow on the eastern edge of the open fields, their possessions on their backs, leading their cattle and sheep behind them as they headed south. Crossing the crab- and clam-rich Black Water River, they were setting out for the baffling, fifty-acre highlands, and Northeast Gaomi Township’s remarkable “snow market” – a marketplace erected on the snowy ground – for their snowbound business transactions, ancestral sacrifices, and celebrations.
This was a rite for which people knew they had to keep all their thoughts bottled up inside, for the minute they opened their mouths to make them known, catastrophes would rain down on them. At the snow market, you engaged your senses of sight, smell, and touch to comprehend what was going on around you; you could think, but you mustn’t speak. Exactly what might befall you if you broke the speech proscription was something no one ever questioned, let alone answered; it was as if everyone knew, but participated in a tacit agreement not to divulge the answer. Northeast Gaomi Township’s survivors of the carnage – mostly women and children – all dressed up in their New Year’s finest and headed through the snow toward the highlands, their noses pricked by the icy smell of the snow at their feet. The women covered their noses and mouths with the sleeves of their thickly lined coats, and although it might appear that they were trying to ward off the biting smell of the snow, I was pretty sure it was to keep them from saying anything. A steady crunching sound rose from the white land, and while the people observed the practice of not speaking, their livestock didn’t. Sheep bleated, cows mooed, and those few aging horses and crippled mules that had somehow made it through the battles whinnied. Rabid wild dogs tore at the corpses along the way with their unyielding claws and howled at the sun like wolves. The only village pet to escape the ravages of rabies, the blind dog belonging to the Taoist priest Men Shengwu, followed its master bashfully through the snow. A three-room hut in front of a brick pagoda on the highlands was home to 120-year-old Men Shengwu, a practitioner of a magical art form known as eschewing grain. Rumor had it that he had not eaten human food for ten years, surviving exclusively on morning dew, like cicadas that live in trees.