Like a dog whose soul had taken flight, I slunk out of the church. There, on the ancient street, I saw Pastor Malory, a black robe draped across his shoulders, slowly wandering along. His face was mud-spattered; tender yellow buds of wheat were sprouting in his hair. His eyes, looking like frozen grapes, shone with the light of sorrow. In a loud voice, I reported to him that Mother had married Sima Ting. I saw his face twitch in agony, and watched as his frame and the black robe began to break up and dissolve into curls of black, stinking smoke.
Eldest Sister was in the yard, her snowy white neck bent down as she washed her lush black hair. In that position, her lovely pink breasts were singing like a pair of silky-voiced orioles. When she straightened up, crystalline beads of water coursed down the valley between her breasts. With one hand, she coiled the back of her hair as she narrowed her eyes and looked at me, a smirk on her face. “Are you aware,” I said, “that she’s marrying Sima Ting?” Again that smirk; she ignored me. Mother walked into the house hand in hand with Shangguan Yunii, shameful rose petals still stuck to her hair. Dejected Sima Ting was right behind them. Eldest Sister picked up her basin and flung the water into the air, where it spread into a luminous fan. Mother sighed, but said nothing. Sima Ting handed his medal to me, either to win me over or to prove his worth, but I just stared at him solemnly. A look of hypocrisy was frozen on his smiling face. He averted his eyes and covered his embarrassment with a cough. I flung the medal away. It flew over the rooftop like a bird, trailing a gold-colored ribbon behind it. “Go pick that up!” Mother said angrily. “No,” I replied defiantly.
Sima Ting said, “Let it be, forget it. There’s no need to keep that around.”
Mother slapped me.
I fell backward and rolled around on the ground. Mother kicked me.
“Shame on you!” I spat out venomously. “You have no shame!”
Mother’s head slumped from her weighty sorrow and a loud wail burst from her mouth; she turned and ran tearfully into the house. Sima Ting sighed before squatting beneath the pear tree to have a smoke.
Several cigarettes later, he stood up and said, “Go in and talk to your mother, nephew. Get her to stop crying.” Then he took the marriage certificate out of his pocket, tore it into strips, and tossed them to the ground just before walking out of the yard, stooped over, an old man, like a candle guttering in the wind.
3
At the height of the age of bluster, Sima Ku gave his revered mentor, the nearsighted Qin Er, a pair of rhinestone eyeglasses. Now, with the counterrevolutionary gift perched on his nose, Qin was sitting at a brick rostrum holding an open volume of Chinese literature, his voice trembling as he lectured to us, Northeast Gaomi Township’s first freshman class, a group whose ages varied dramatically. The heavy eyeglasses slid halfway down the bridge of his nose; a single drop of oily green snot hung from the tip of his nose, threatening to drop to the floor, but somehow hanging on. Big goats are big- he intoned. Even though it was already the sixth month, among the hottest of the year, he sat there wearing a lined, black, full-length robe and a black satin skullcap with a red tassel. Big goats are big – we shouted out the words, trying to mimic his tone of voice. Little goats are little – he intoned sorrowfully. The room was stifling, dark and dank, and we sat there, barefoot and shirtless, our bodies covered with greasy sweat, while our teacher, dressed for winter, his face pale and his lips purple, looked as if he were freezing. Little goats are little – our voices resounded in the room, which smelled like stale urine, like a neglected goat pen. Big goats and little goats run up the hill – Big goats and little goats run up the hill – Big goats run, little goats bleat – Big goats run, little goats bleat - given my profound knowledge of goats, I knew that big goats, with their sagging teats, couldn’t run; why, they could barely walk. For little goats to bleat was entirely possible, and, for that matter, to run. Big goats grazed lazily in the pasture, while little goats ran around bleating. I was tempted to raise my hand to ask the venerable teacher his opinion, but I didn’t dare. A discipline ruler lay in front of him, its sole purpose to smack the palms of disobedient students’ hands. Big goats eat a lot – Big goats eat a lot – Little goats eat a little – Little goats eat a little- those were true statements. Of course big goats eat more than little goats, and little goats eat less than big goats. Big goats are big – little goats are little – with that, we went back and started over from the beginning. The teacher intoned on and on tirelessly, but classroom order began to fall apart. One of the students, Wu Yunyu, was a tall, husky eighteen-year-old son of a farm laborer. He was already married to the widowed proprietor of a bean curd shop, who was eight years his senior and in the last stage of pregnancy. He was about to become a daddy. The soon-to-be daddy took a rusty pistol from his waistband and took aim at the red tassel of Qin Er’s cap. Big goats run – Big goats – pow! Ha ha ha ha, run – The teacher looked up, his gray ovine eyes peering down over the top of the rhinestone lenses. He was so myopic he probably couldn’t see a thing. So he went back to reading. Little goats bleat-pow! Wu Yunyu fired off another imaginary shot, and the red tassel on the old teacher’s cap fluttered. Laughter filled the room. The teacher picked up his ruler and smacked the table. “Quiet!” he demanded, like a judge. The recitation recommenced. Guo Qiusheng, the seventeen-year-old son of a poor peasant, left his seat at a crouch and tiptoed up to the rostrum, where he stood behind the teacher, bit his lower lip with his ratlike front teeth, and made gestures of stuffing shells into a mortar, the barrel of which was the top of the teacher’s bony skull. Over and over he fired his imaginary weapon. Chaos took over in the classroom, with all of us rocking back and forth laughing. Xu Lianhe, a big boy, pounded his desk, while the smaller but fatter Fang Shuzhai tore out the pages of his book and flung them into the air, where they fluttered like butterflies.
The old teacher banged the table over and over, but that didn’t quiet things down. He kept peering over his eyeglasses, trying to determine the cause of all the commotion; meanwhile, Guo Qiusheng was furiously acting out his violently humiliating performance behind
Qin Er, eliciting strange yells from all the idiotic boys over the age of fifteen. Then Guo Qiusheng’s hand brushed against the ear of the old teacher, who spun around and grabbed the offending hand.
“Recite your lesson!” the stately old teacher demanded.
Guo Qiusheng stood at the rostrum with his hands at his side, trying to look the part of the obedient student. But the smirk on his face betrayed him. He pointed his lips to turn his mouth into what looked like a belly button. Then he shut one eye and twisted his mouth as far as it would go to one side. He clenched his teeth, making his ears wiggle.
“Recite your lesson!” the teacher roared angrily.
Guo Qiusheng began: Big girls are big, little girls are little, big girls chase the little girls away.
Amid the crazed laughter that followed, Qin Er stood up by gripping the edge of the table. His gray beard quivered as he muttered: “Bad boy! Bad boys cannot be taught!” He groped for his ruler, grabbed Guo Qiusheng’s hand, and pressed it down on the table. “Bad boy!” Pa. The ruler landed savagely on the hand of Guo Qiusheng, who cried out hoarsely. The teacher looked him in the eye and raised the ruler over his head; but his arm froze when he saw the insolent look of a proletarian thug on Guo’s face, those steely black eyes glinting with a hateful defiance. A look of defeat crept into the teacher’s rheumy gaze, and he let his arm drop weakly to his side, ruler in hand. He mumbled and took off his eyeglasses, which he placed in a metal case, wrapped with a piece of blue cloth, and put into his pocket. He also tucked the offending ruler, with which he’d once punished Sima Ku, into his robe. That done, he removed his skullcap, bowed to Guo Qiusheng, then turned and bowed to the class, and finally announced in a mournful voice that evoked both pity and disgust: