Several days later, after tramping through a sea of knee-high mud, the conscientious chief investigator and the medical examiner found Long Qingping’s body, which had been snagged by the wire fence. But as the examiner was photographing the body, it exploded like a time bomb, its rotting skin and sticky juices fouling the water over a wide area. All that remained snagged on the fence was a skeleton. The medical examiner retrieved the skull, with its bullet hole, and examined it from every angle. He arrived at two conclusions: the muzzle was up against the temple when the shot was fired, and while it looked like suicide, murder was a possibility.
They prepared to take Jintong back with them, but were quickly surrounded by rightists. “Take a good look at this boy,” Ji Qiongzhi said, taking advantage of her special relationship with the chief investigator. “Does he look like someone who’s capable of rape and murder? That woman was a terrifying demon. This boy, on the other hand, was my student.”
By that time, the chief investigator had himself nearly been driven to suicide by hunger and the pervasive stench. “The case is closed,” he said, fed up with the whole matter. “Long Qingping took her own life.” With that, he and the medical examiner climbed into their rubber raft to return to headquarters. But the raft no sooner left the bank than it spun around and was swept downriver.
6
In the spring of 1960, when the countryside was littered with the corpses of famine victims, members of the Flood Dragon River Farm rightist unit were transformed into a herd of ruminants, scouring the earth for vegetation to quell their hunger. Everyone was limited to an ounce and a half of grain daily, minus the amount skimmed off the top by the storekeeper, the manager of the dining hall, and other important individuals. What remained was enough for a bowl of porridge so thin they could see their reflection in it. But that didn’t release them from their duties of rebuilding the farm. Also, with the help of soldiers from the local artillery unit, they cultivated acres of muddy land with millet. Poison was added to the fertilizer to keep away the thieves. It was so potent that the ground was carpeted with dead crickets, worms, and assorted other insects unknown to the rightist Fang Huawen, who was a trained biologist. Birds that fed on insects flopped over stiff, and critters that came to feed on their corpses hopped into the air and were dead before they hit the ground.
In the spring, when the millet crop was knee high, all sorts of vegetables were ready to be picked, and the rightists out in the field crammed whatever they could find into their mouths as they worked. During rest periods, they sat in trenches, regurgitating the leafy mess in their stomachs to chew it up as finely as possible. Green saliva gathered at the corners of their mouths, on faces so bloated the skin was translucent.
No more than ten farm workers were spared from dropsy. The new director, called Little Old Du, was one of them; the granary storekeeper, Guo Zilan, was another, and everyone knew they were pilfering horse feed. Special Agent Wei Guoying did not suffer, since his wolfhound warranted a supply of meat. Another man, by the name of Zhou Tianbao, was also spared. As a child he’d blown off three of his fingers with a homemade bomb; years later, he’d lost an eye when his rifle blew up in his face. Put in charge of farm security, he slept during the day and prowled every corner of the farm at night, armed with a Czech rifle. He was housed in a tiny sheet-metal hut in a corner of the military hardware scrapyard, from which the fragrant odor of meat being cooked often emerged late at night. The smell made sleep all but impossible for people in the area. One night, Guo Wenhao crept over to the hut and was about to peek in the window when he felt the thud of a rifle butt. “Damn you,” Zhou Tianbao cursed, the light from his one good eye cutting through the darkness. “A counterrevolutionary! What are you doing, sneaking around like this?” The muzzle of Zhou’s rifle dug into Guo’s back. “What’s cooking in there, Tianbao?” Guo asked mischievously. “How about giving me a taste?” “I doubt that you have the guts,” Zhou grumbled softly. “The only thing with four legs I won’t eat is a table,” Guo said. “And the only two-legged thing I won’t eat is a person.” Zhou laughed. “That’s human meat I’m cooking.” Guo Wenhao turned and ran.
Word that Zhou Tianbao was eating human flesh quickly made the rounds, throwing everyone into a panic. People slept with one eye open, terrified that Zhou would come get them for his next meal. In order to quell the rumor, Little Old Du called a meeting to announce that he had looked into the matter, and that Zhou Tianbao was cooking and eating rats he found in abandoned tanks. He told everyone, especially the rightists, to quit acting like stinking intellectuals and learn how to open up new sources of food, like Zhou Tianbao, in order to save up grain during lean years and make it possible to support people throughout the world who are worse off than us. Wang Siyuan, a graduate of an agricultural college, suggested growing mushrooms on rotting wood; Little Old Du gave him the go-ahead. Two weeks later, the mushroom plan led to the poisoning of more than a hundred people; some suffered no more than a bout of vomiting and diarrhea, but others were temporarily deranged, as if they were speaking in tongues. The security section thought it was an act of sabotage, but the health department attributed it to food poisoning. As a result, Little Old Du was censured, and the rightist Wang Siyuan was reclassified as an ultra-rightist. Most of the victims were treated in time and were soon out of danger. Huo Lina, on the other hand, could not be saved. In the aftermath of her death, a rumor spread that she had been involved with a dining hall worker everyone called Pockface Zhang, and that she always got larger helpings of food than the others. Someone said that on a Sunday night, during the movie, the two of them were seen slipping out in the dark into some tall grass.
Huo Lina’s death hit Jintong especially hard, and he refused to believe that someone from a good family who had gone to school in Russia would give herself to anyone as ugly and as coarse as Pockface Zhang for a little extra soup. What happened later on to Qiao Qisha proved him wrong. For when a woman is so undernourished that her breasts lie flat on her chest and her periods stop coming, self-respect and chastity cease to exist. Poor Jintong was to witness the entire incident, from start to finish.
During the spring, some plow oxen were delivered to the farm. Before long, they discovered there weren’t enough females for mating purposes, so they castrated four of the bulls to fatten them up for food. Ma Ruilian was still in charge of the livestock unit, but with significantly less power, now that Li Du was dead. So when Deng Jiarong walked off with all eight of the detached testicles, all she could do was glare at his back. When she detected the salivating fragrance of the testicles on Deng Jiarong’s grill wafting out of the breeding station, she told Chen San to bring some back. Deng demanded a quantity of horse feed in return, to which Ma Ruilian reluctantly agreed, exchanging a catty of dried bean cakes for one of the testicles.