The man in charge of the execution raised a little red flag and announced in a loud voice, “Ready -”
The firing squad raised their weapons, waiting for the command. An icy grin spread across Sima Ku’s face as he stared down the black muzzles of the rifles aimed at him. A red glare rose above the dike, and the smell of women blanketed heaven and earth. Sima Ku shouted:
“Women are wonderful things -”
The dull crack of rifle fire split Sima Ku’s head like a ripe melon, sending blood and brain in all directions. His body stiffened for a brief moment, and then toppled forward. At that moment, like the climactic scene in a play, just before the curtain drops, the widow Cui Fengxian from Sandy Mouth Village, wearing a red satin jacket over green satin pants, a spray of golden-yellow silk flowers in her hair, flew down from the top of the dike and lay on the ground beside Sima Ku. I assumed she would begin to wail over the corpse, but she didn’t. Maybe the sight of Sima Ku’s shattered skull drove the courage out of her. She took a pair of scissors from her waistband, which I thought she was going to plunge into her breast to accompany Sima Ku in death. But she didn’t. In the midst of all those staring eyes, she plunged the scissors into Sima Ku’s dead chest. Then she covered her face, shattered the stillness with shrieks of grief, and staggered off as fast as her feet would take her.
The crowd of onlookers stood there like wooden stakes. Sima Ku’s decidedly inelegant last words had bored their way into their hearts, tickling them as they crawled around mischievously. Are women really wonderful things? Maybe they are. Yes, women definitely are wonderful things, but when all is said and done, they aren’t really “things.”
Chapter Six
1
On the day of Shangguan Jintong’s eighteenth birthday, Shangguan Pandi took Lu Shengli away with her. Jintong sat on the dike gazing unhappily at swallows soaring above the river. Sha Zaohua came out of the woods and handed him his birthday present – a little mirror. The dark-skinned girl already had nicely developed breasts; her dark, slightly crossed eyes looked like pebbles on the river bottom and were filled with the glow of passion. “Why don’t you keep it for Sima Liang when he gets back?” Jintong said. She reached into her pocket and took out a larger mirror. “This one’s for him.” “Where’d you get so many mirrors?” Jintong asked, obviously surprised. “I stole them from the co-op,” she said in a soft voice. “I met a thief wizard at the Wopu Market who took me on as her apprentice. After I finish my apprenticeship, if there’s anything you need, just tell me, and I’ll steal it for you. My teacher stole a watch off the wrist of a Soviet adviser and a gold tooth right out of his mouth.” “But that’s against the law.” “She said minor thievery is against the law, but not big-time stealing.” Taking Jintong’s fingers in her hand, she said, “You’ve got soft, slender fingers. You’d make a good thief.” “No, not me. I don’t have the nerve. But Sima Liang does, he’s got guts and he’s always vigilant. He’s your man. You can teach him when he gets back.” As Zaohua put away the big mirror, she said “Liangzi, Liangzi, when will you be coming back?” sounding like a grown-up woman.
Sima Liang had disappeared five years earlier. We buried Sima Ku the day after he was shot, and Sima Liang took off that night. A cold, dank wind from the northeast made the chipped pots and jugs on the wall sing out gloomily. We sat dully in front of a solitary lantern, and when the wind blew out the flame, we sat in the darkness. No one spoke; we were all caught up in the scene surrounding Sima Ku’s burial. Lacking a coffin, we had to wrap his body in a straw mat, like a leek in a flat-cake, good and tight, and truss it up with rope. A dozen or so people carried his body over to the public cemetery, where we dug a hole. Then we stood at the head of the grave, where Sima Liang fell to his knees and kowtowed once. There were no tears on his finely wrinkled face. I wanted to say something to make this dear friend of mine feel better, but couldn’t think of a thing. On the road home, he whispered, “I’m going to take off, Little Uncle.” “Where to?” I asked him. “I don’t know.” At the moment the wind blew out the lantern flame, I thought I saw a dark, hazy image slip out the door, and I was pretty sure that Sima Liang had left, though there wasn’t a sound. Just like that, he was gone. With a bamboo pole, Mother probed the bottom of every dry well and deep pond in the area, but I knew she was wasting her time, since Sima Liang was not the type to kill himself. Mother then sent people into neighboring villages to look for him, but all she got were conflicting reports. One person said he’d spotted him in a traveling circus, while someone else said he’d seen the body of a little boy by the side of a lake, his face pecked clean by vultures; a group of conscripts back from the Northeast said they’d seen him near a bridge over the Yalu River. The Korean War was heating up then, and U.S. warplanes came on daily bombing runs.
I looked into the little mirror Zaohua had given me, getting my first good view of my features. At eighteen, I had a shock of yellow hair, pale, fleshy ears, brows the color of ripe wheat, and sallow lashes that cast a shadow over deep blue eyes. A high nose, pink lips, skin covered with fine hairs. To tell the truth, I’d already gotten an idea of what I looked like by looking at Eighth Sister. With a sense of sadness, I was forced to admit that Shangguan Shouxi was definitely not our father, and that whoever he was, he looked like the man people sometimes talked about in hushed conversations. We were, I realized, the illegitimate offspring of the Swedish man of the cloth, Pastor Malory, a couple of bastards. Frightful inferiority feelings gnawed at my heart. I dyed my hair black and darkened my face, but there was nothing I could do about the color of my eyes, which I’d have liked to gouge out altogether. I recalled stories I’d heard about people who committed suicide by swallowing gold, so I rummaged around in Laidi’s jewelry box until I found a gold ring dating back to Sha Yueliang’s days. I stretched out my neck and swallowed the thing, then lay down on the kang to await death, while Eighth Sister sat on the edge of the kang spinning thread. When Mother returned from work at the co-op and saw me lying there, she caught her breath in surprise. I expected her to feel a sense of shame, but what I saw instead was a look of terrifying anger. She grabbed me by the hair and jerked me into a sitting position, then began slapping me, over and over, until my gums bled, my ears rang, and I saw stars.
“That’s right, Pastor Malory was your father, so what? Wash that stuff off your face and out of your hair, then go out in the street with your head held high, and announce: My father was the Swedish Pastor Malory, which makes me an heir to royalty, and a damned sight better than the likes of you turtles!” All the while she was slapping me, Eighth Sister sat quietly spinning her threads, as if none of this had anything to do with her.
I sobbed the whole time I was squatting in front of the basin washing my face, turning the water black. Mother stood behind me, cursing under her breath, but I knew I was no longer the target of those curses. When I was finished, she ladled out some clean water and poured it over my head as she began to cry. The water ran down my nose and chin and into the basin on the floor, slowly turning the water clear again. While she dried my hair, Mother said: “Back then there was nothing I could do, son. You are what you are, so stand up straight and act like a man. You’re eighteen years old, no longer a child. Sima Ku had his faults, plenty of them, but he lived his life like a man, and that’s worth emulating.”